“The only thing that makes one happy is to seek the unattainable.” 1

"To make herself attractive to men, a woman must continually sacrifice her freedom, her comfort, and even her integrity (although usually women's integrity has been destroyed since childhood)." 2

"I avidly want to live many lives... I will be many people before I die." 3

Born on January 19, 1921, in Fort Worth, Texas, to freshly divorced parents, Mary Patricia Plangman was raised by her mother Mary and her grandmother Willie Mae. She met her biological father only later in life and briefly, and got the surname Highsmith from her step father Stanley, whom her mother married when Patricia was three years old. After moving back and forth, in and out of Texas, the Highsmith family finally settled in New York, where Patricia attended high school and then entered Barnard College.

As an only child, her childhood and teen years were marked by a thwarted love for her beautiful, selfish and scheming mother, by her jealousy towards her stepfather and by the arguments at home. The unhappiness of those early years and her experience of family as a battleground of terrible conflicts shaped her sense of being different and sparked her fascination with the pathological and abnormal, lurking beneath the surface of “normality”.

From a very young age, Patricia was aware of being attracted to women and she was conscious of the fact that she had to navigate her homosexuality in a deeply homophobic world, where “deviant” behaviours were considered on a par with crimes and degrading illnesses, and had to be kept secret. A judgemental and unbearable mother, combined with the social condemnation of homosexuality, fuelled the struggle against her own guilt, that would eventually inspire her most famous character, Tom Ripley – a murderer and forger, immoral self-inventor, living on the edge and always getting away with it.

She was a voracious reader, seeking in books a vision of the world and the individual in which she could see herself – while feeling so different from her peers. Gifted in drawing, she spent years torn between painting and writing, eventually choosing the latter. Since her adolescence she got into the habit of keeping a diary, a practice she maintained throughout her life. Diary writing became an important activity for self-analysis, mirror and memory, as well as a support for her writing career. In New York, she struggled to get her short stories published and, for years, she made a living by writing comics scripts – a job she was ashamed of.

Strangers on a Train, her first novel, was adapted into a film directed by Hitchcock: from there on began a long, non-stop romance between cinema and Patricia Highsmith – though it was a one-sided relationship, as she never cared for cinema. Her second book, The Price of Salt, later republished under the title Carol, tells the story of the forbidden love between the young Therese, her alter ego, and the beautiful, wealthy divorcée Carol, a composite of several women she admired and loved in the whirlwind of post-war New York. Published in 1952 under the pseudonym Claire Morgan, the novel unfolds with the pacing of a thriller and achieved great success. It would remain her only book centred on a lesbian relationship and one of the very few featuring female protagonists. Despite her disdain for labels, Highsmith resigned herself to being classified as a thriller writer –suspense, unease, anguish and the irrationality of the human mind and its dark depths became her material and the tools of her trade.

Romantic and promiscuous, ambitious, hardworking, professional dreamer, voyeuse, outsider, misfit, misanthrope and misogynist, idealist yet cynical – Highsmith embraced her contradictions, falling for women who “hurt her” because they were more interesting, unable to bear peace nor stillness, in love with the storm but always in search of a quiet refuge to work. Until her thirties, she dreamed of Europe, where she eventually embarked on long journeys until she finally settled in 1963, first in England, then in France and at last in Switzerland – though always unsatisfied, grappling with a restlessness that only subsided when she immersed herself in her creative unconscious and in writing.

“A book is a really long continuous process, which ideally, should be interrupted only by sleep.” 4

She had several love stories, both real and fictional, as the one she described in This Sweet Sickness, and also attempted some cohabitations that turned out to be a disaster. Often described as a hermit and antisocial, she lived with her beloved cats, drinking and smoking as she did in her youth, rejecting the idea of health, which she considered a mere convention – much like justice. At 65, she underwent a surgery for lung cancer – “art isn’t always healthy, and why should it be?” 5

In the 1970s she achieved international fame and was hailed as the mistress of suspense. She wrote over 30 books between novels and short stories, in which she explores the irrational and repressed pulses of the human psyche, the edges of madness, conflicts within relationships, violent instincts, identity as a social construct, voyeurism and reverie as alternative worlds to reality. She enjoyed satirizing women’s flaws in Little Tales of Misogyny, offered a dark portrayal of a housewife’s alienation in Edith’s Diary, and gave animals the chance of redemption and revenge against human cruelty in The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder.

She passed away on February 4,1995, at Carità Hospital in Locarno. She had bequeathed her diaries and notebooks to the Swiss Literary Archives at the Swiss National Library and had left her estate to Yaddo – a retreat for young artists – as a testament to her belief in youths and in their creative potential.


Translated by Cecilia Chiarelli.
1 Diaries, 5.08.1985. Translation by Cecilia Chiarelli.
2 Diaries, 07.03.1940. Translation by Cecilia Chiarelli.
3 Diaries, 15.05.1950. Translation by Cecilia Chiarelli.
4 Plotting and Writing Suspence Fiction.
5 Diaries, 20.05.1990. Translation by Cecilia Chiarelli.