The woman behind the sociopaths
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You most likely have seen the film versions of The Talented Mr. Ripley, or perhaps Strangers on a Train. Who was the author who created these chilling sociopaths? Patricia Highsmith, an American writer, born in Texas in 1921 to an absent father and a mother who didn’t want her.
The 2022 documentary Loving Highsmith, through the author’s diaries, notebooks and reflections of her lovers, friends and family, explores the life, work and loves of this complex, often unlikeable character. She was gay, forced to conceal from her family and public her at times wild underground lifestyle and her affairs – preferably with older, rich married women. She charmed many, but she could also be offensive, anti-social , racist and shocking.As a dinner party guest, she once liberated a handful of her pet snails on the table, and once at a dull moment, bent over a candle, setting her hair on fire.)
Despite her alcoholism, she was a disciplined, prolific writer with a murderous imagination who who mined her personal life for material. She could have been a character in her own novels, and, in fact, in the 1950s, she wrote the quasi-autobiographical lesbian novel The Price of Salt (reissued as Carol)under a pseudonym.
How close to a true portrayal of this multi-faceted individual does Loving Highsmith get? Janice Kulyk Keefer, author, detective fiction fan and former Guelph University prof in modernist literature, will be our guest for the Q&A. She will help us assess the documentary and understand this talented author who could create the duplicitous Mr. Ripley.
Check out this fascinating article in Vanity Fair.
Watch the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLPXGai64Sc&t=7s
Tickets in advance: General, $17.50, including fees; Seniors and students, $14.50. Available through the Revue Cinema website: Click here.
About our guest speaker:
Janice Kulyk Keefer, who lives in Roncesvalles and has long supported Back Lane Studios, returns to discuss a favourite subject — crime fiction. A specialist in modernist literature, Janice is professor emerita at Guelph University. Here post-graduate theses were on Virginia Woolf and Joseph Conrad. She has written over a dozen books including poetry, novels, a family memoir and academic sorks. She has also presented many talks for Back Lane Studios, including online presentations on detective fiction.
Click here for her biography in the Canadian Encyclopedia.
About the film:
Released in 2022, this documentary is a German Swiss production. It’s directed by Eva Vitija, who says this about her project: “Highsmith’s image is determined to a great extent by the last years of her life in Switzerland, and by her reputation as a grim, misanthropic crime writer – just as she was portrayed to me as a small child. When I began to study Highsmith’s notebooks (cahiers, as she called them) and diaries in the Swiss Literary Archive and met with her former friends in various country, I was extremely moved and surprised to discover a completely different person behind the familiar image: a beautiful young writer with an extremely romantic streak and a poetic style who led an incredibly active love life in the wild New York of the post-war years – and also a moving and unforgettable personality who fell in love with new women again and again.”