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Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. My name is Thomas Jones. And this week I'm

talking with Terry Castle, who teaches English at Stanford and has a piece in the current

issue of the LRB on Patricia Highsmith. It's a review of a new biography by Richard Bradford,

an unsavory new biography, as she puts it, and we'll be talking a bit about that, but also about

Highsmith's life and work more generally. Hello, Terry, and thank you very much for joining me.

Hello, Tom. Thank you very much for inviting me on your podcast.

So if we begin with Bradford's biography, maybe to get it out of the way, so to speak,

and you say that he approaches Highsmith's life with what might politely be called a hermeneutics of suspicion,

sort of convinced that she made up a lot of the people in her diaries, her girlfriends especially,

and that they were her first fictional characters. And at the same time, he reads her novels as disguised biography, sort of getting the fiction and the life back to front. But is there

a more productive way to look at the relationship between her life and her work? Because

having read your piece, then going back to the talented Mr. Ripley,

I find it quite hard not to see the ways in which Ripley's a kind of self-portrait.

Oh, well, yes.

And he is.

And I overstated the issue to some degree,

but it is true that Bradford doesn't seem to be able to modulate this dynamic very well. And I've read a lot of the journals and her writing diaries that are in the literary archive in Switzerland.

And you see that, yes, she did use her cayet, as she called them, to write little story ideas

and indeed little prises of things.

But it's very clear what has happened to her

...