I find I am more likely to write about toxic people if they are dead. Patricia Highsmith will not be getting any of my money regardless of my actions, and the organizations to which she left her money and literary estate seem decent. But wow would she be canceled if she were expressing her views today. She honestly just doesn’t seem to have liked people as a whole very much, but some of the specific people she expressed dislike of and how she did it are not okay. She slept with men, when she slept with men, because she liked them better than women; she was attracted to women but found them annoying and boring. She intensely disliked sex with men, however.

Now, disliking her family, I can understand. Her parents divorced ten days before her birth. She said her mother told her she’d tried to abort Patricia by drinking turpentine; a biographer claims that, instead, her father had tried to get her mother to have an abortion and her mother refused. Her mother and stepfather shipped her off from New York to Fort Worth to live with her grandmother when she was twelve, leaving young Patricia feeling abandoned. (You know, because she arguably was?) Her grandmother did teach her to read when she was very young, and at age nine, she was already reading Freudian analysis.

I can also sympathize with the desire to live in an old farmhouse surrounded by books and cats. Especially on a day when my kids keep coming in to talk to me while I’m trying to work; my daughter has a particular knack for asking me a pointless question when I’ve just gotten the perfect wording, thereby driving it out of my mind forever. I’m with you, there, Patricia, though she also said that being around people sapped her imagination. Most people seem to have disliked her right back, though David Diamond said her unpleasant traits were depression and Phyllis Nagy, who adapted The Price of Salt into the film Carol, thought she was wonderful and was friends with her for years.

However, let’s be real, she was racist. She blamed black people for the welfare state and accused Koreans of eating dogs. She was pro-Palestinian to the point of being deeply anti-Semitic (fun fact; it’s possible to not do that). She seems to have been almost-but-not-quite a Holocaust denier. These are not things you want to discover when you’re writing about someone. I’m kind of curious how she rationalized being Freudian, given Freud’s Jewish heritage. You’d think she would have distrusted analysis, especially given it didn’t “normalize” her sexuality the way she wanted it to.

Despite her vile personal nature, she was after all a brilliant writer. And she’s dead, so I don’t have to worry about giving money to a racist who also managed to be both a lesbian and a misogynist. She didn’t like being called a crime writer, one of the few things she disliked that I can fully go along with. She wanted her books to be thought of as psychological thrillers, which they were. I mean, not all of them, but after all The Price of Salt was published pseudonymously and wouldn’t have been part of that conversation anyway.

I promise I don’t have toxic views that would make you ashamed to contribute to my Patreon or Ko-fi!