Highsmith's command of demons

In 1959, Patricia Highsmith took her mother to Paris for a holiday, and the two women checked into the Hotel du Quai Voltaire. A few days later, some journalists were due at the hotel to interview the famous mistress of suspense. Wondering why they were late, Patricia Highsmith sat in her bedroom. Then the telephone rang. "The journalists told me that my mother was downstairs and that for five minutes or more had tried to convince them that she was me."

Highsmith's relationship with her mother is really the central drama in this absorbing and terribly sad book. A much younger lover of Highsmith's, Marion Aboudaram, recalls that "Almost every time before we started to make love, Pat held my hand and would say, 'Tell me about your mother'".

Highsmith's own relationship with her mother, Mary, was one of ingenious and mutual loathing from an early stage. Highsmith was the name of Mary's second husband (Patricia was really the daughter of Jay Bernard Plangman, and Stanley Highsmith was her stepfather).

Although her mother and stepfather gave her Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving as a Christmas present in 1967, it was not an art in which either they, or she, excelled.

Patricia grew up in an atmosphere of recriminations and quarrels; her lesbianism disgusted them, and her obvious literary talent was misunderstood and envied from the first. Yet in grown-up life, she gave as good as she got to poor old Mary.

Her rare visits home left the oldies stunned, recalling not only her verbal attacks, but her violence - "throwing a big container of milk all over the place and breaking the louvered door, like a mad woman," as Stanley reminded her in a letter. Highsmith responded to these missives with tremendous vigour. "You can be wrong so fluently," said poor old Stanley.

Presumably, the confused and obsessive dislike the two women felt for one another lay at the background of Highsmith's everlasting pursuit of sexual partners. "I have a pattern of choosing people with whom I don't feel comfortable," the novelist confessed. "Maybe this is because I am attracted to perfectionists, people who boss me. For goodness sake, don't show this letter to a psychiatrist, for he would say, Highsmith is the nut!"

Yet, as the little joke implies, Highsmith remained self-consciously in control of her demons. The fascinating thing in the life of any good writer is the manner in which they can harness to their advantage weaknesses and character-traits which in non-writers would be debilitating burdens. Thanks to growing up with a woman she loathed - and thanks to a number of other things, too, such as possessing an imagination of near-genius - she knew what it was like to be a murderous psychopath. Or, she knew how to make us suppose that we knew what it was like.

She also knew how to invert all our supposed moral assumptions, and positively rejoice, from the safety of our armchairs, when the talented Mr Ripley yet again gets away with murder.

From an unhappy American childhood to a solitary death in Switzerland in 1995, her life was a wild, alcohol-fuelled trajectory of repeated emotional ups and downs. Reading this book has changed my mind about one of Highsmith's favourite authors, Proust.