My Cave Paintings

If I were a paleolithic painter, here's how I'd decorate the walls of my man cave.

A couple of weeks ago, The New Yorker published excerpts from the 8,000 pages of diaries written by Patricia Highsmith, who in addition to being a journal-ist, was a novelist. She was in her twenties when she was writing these anguished entries, trying to sort out her sexual preference, whether or not to keep on writing comics for a living or just bang on with the fiction, and whether to stop at five martinis or go on to the sixth.

Just like me!

Except for the part where Highsmith was a) invited to the writing workshop Yaddo at age twenty-seven, and b) went on to publish twenty-two novels, including Strangers on a Train (brought to the screen by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951), Carol (released in 2015 as a film starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara), and The Talented Mr. Ripley (with Matt Damon super creepy in the title role, released in 1999).

OK, good on you, Highsmith.

But given all that we already have in common, I read her journal entries with heightened interest, scanning for other co…