Book Review: "Her Diaries and Notebooks" by Patricia Highsmith

Now, I have read many 'diaries and notebooks', 'letters and correspondences' by many different authors that have intrigued me over the years. The one that I enjoyed the most was probably the letters of Truman Capote, purely because you could definitely read them all in his own voice. I thought that was incredible. Another one I enjoyed was the Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde along with the letters of Kurt Vonnegut and the letters of HP Lovecraft.

Apart from letters, I have enjoyed diaries including The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, Notebooks by Albert Camus, The Diaries by Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Christopher Isherwood, The Diaries by George Orwell, Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne and yes, even A Writer's Notebook by W. Somerset Maugham. There are probably more than this but this is what I can remember for now.

In this book entitled Her Diaries and Notebooks by Patricia Highsmith, we get to see the great mind behind some of the most fantastic American Noir novels of all time. Concerning everything from her unpleasant engagement to her writing and publication of her incredible novel - Strangers on a Train - this book seems to take Highsmith's life very seriously not only through the diaries, but also when making comments on her at the beginning of each separate chapter.

We all know that Patricia Highsmith was a particular enigmatic human being who sheltered herself well from the scrutiny of the public eye by deliberately being introverted in interviews of any kind, never giving away too much information, never allowing an authorised biography and yet, here we sit with her diaries and letters. Though I don't see her being too pleased about that if she had lived to our day (and possibly to just over 100 years' old), her genius is still reflected in each word of each entry.

One of the parts I liked the most was when Patricia Highsmith seems to think she is pregnant. She gets very upset and gloomy about it because her menstrual cycle is late - but when it comes back and the tests are all negative, Highsmith is over the moon. She may be overjoyed but her to-be-husband is not hoping it would have bought them closer together. It is only a month or so after this that Highsmith breaks off the relationship and returns to going around with who she wishes.

Another thing I really enjoyed about this novel was its sense of writing. When you read Patricia Highsmith's writing, you can't really imagine this woman writing a dainty diary in the window of her 19th century gothic mansion. Instead, she does something very dissimilar, where polite society have diary entries that are pages long and scribes writing them up, Patricia Highsmith's very down-to-earth diary has sometimes got entries that are only a sentence or so long. It really subverts the expectation of the reader and yet, there is so much to gather from it. It becomes far deeper than you would have initially thought.

Patricia Highsmith's character really shines through, she is a woman who likes company fewer times more than many. She prefers the company of women who think like she does, or who have an aura of intelligence rather than the vapid ignorance of her ex-lover Marc. She prefers the airs of Florence with its history, culture and wholesomeness, rather than the big city of Rome with its winding paths and distant alleyways. She would rather go to a museum than a lido and she would rather drink than sit in a cafe and do nothing.

Everything about this woman seems to be coming through in new ways that I have never read before. Having read her Tom Ripley series when I was just a teenager and knew nothing about her, this book has really come to the rescue in that department and I go away knowing more about her than ever - and yet, still wanting to know even more.