Edith's Diary

by Patricia Highsmith

As Edith Howland's life becomes harsh, her diary entries only become brighter and brighter. She invents a happy life. As she knits for imaginary grandchildren, the real world recedes. Her descent into madness is subtle, appalling, and entirely believable.

Genres: Fiction, Mystery, Crime, American, Thriller, Suspense, Noir

317 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Patricia Highsmith was an American novelist who is known mainly for her psychological crime thrillers which have led to more than two dozen film adaptations over the years.

She lived with her grandmother, mother and later step-father (her mother divorced her natural father six months before 'Patsy' was born and married Stanley Highsmith) in Fort Worth before moving with her parents to New York in 1927 but returned to live with her grandmother for a year in 1933. Returning to her parents in New York, she attended public schools in New York City and later graduated from Barnard College in 1942.

Shortly after graduation her short story 'The Heroine' was published in the Harper's Bazaar magazine and it was selected as one of the 22 best stories that appeared in American magazines in 1945 and it won the O Henry award for short stories in 1946. She continued to write short stories, many of them comic book stories, and regularly earned herself a weekly $55 pay-check. During this period of her life she lived variously in New York and Mexico.

Her first suspense novel 'Strangers on a Train' published in 1950 was an immediate success with public and critics alike. The novel has been adapted for the screen three times, most notably by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951.

In 1955 her anti-hero Tom Ripley appeared in the splendid 'The Talented Mr Ripley', a book that was awarded the Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere as the best foreign mystery novel translated into French in 1957. This book, too, has been the subject of a number of film versions. Ripley appeared again in 'Ripley Under Ground' in 1970, in 'Ripley's Game' in 1974, 'The boy who Followed Ripley' in 1980 and in 'Ripley Under Water' in 1991.

Along with her acclaimed series about Ripley, she wrote 22 novels and eight short story collections plus many other short stories, often macabre, satirical or tinged with black humour. She also wrote one novel, non-mystery, under the name Claire Morgan , plus a work of non-fiction 'Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction' and a co-written book of children's verse, 'Miranda the Panda Is on the Veranda'.

She latterly lived in England and France and was more popular in England than in her native United States. Her novel 'Deep Water', 1957, was called by the Sunday Times one of the "most brilliant analyses of psychosis in America" and Julian Symons once wrote of her "Miss Highsmith is the writer who fuses character and plot most successfully ... the most important crime novelist at present in practice." In addition, Michael Dirda observed "Europeans honoured her as a psychological novelist, part of an existentialist tradition represented by her own favorite writers, in particular Dostoevsky, Conrad, Kafka, Gide, and Camus."

She died of leukemia in Locarno, Switzerland on 4 February 1995 and her last novel, 'Small g: a Summer Idyll', was published posthumously a month later.

Gerry Wolstenholme
July 2010

Reviews

[Orsodimondo · Rating 4 out of 5]

SPOSTAMENTI PROGRESSIVI DEL DOLORE


Angela Winkler è Edith in “Ediths Tagebuch” di Hans W. Geißendörfer, adattamento di questo romanzo.

Dalla fine degli anni Cinquanta all’inizio degli anni Settanta (1972), la vita di Edith, donna ottimista e intelligente, che scrive articoli per riviste politiche di sinistra, ama l'arte e adora curare la casa.
La vita di Edith, quella reale e quella di fantasia.
Il diario, dove si tende a scrivere le cose che ci succedono e i pensieri che ci ispirano, diventa il luogo dove riporre i sogni, le cose che si vorrebbe succedessero e potessimo vivere, dove racchiudere un’immaginazione che andrebbe arginata.


Edith che scrive il diario.

Come in Il grido della civetta, uscito qualche anno prima, i protagonisti lasciano la Grande Mela per trasferirsi in un paesino della Pennsylvania dove contano di avere una vita migliore: Edith, il marito giornalista, col quale progettano di avviare un giornale una volta sistemati in provincia, e il figlio di dieci anni, che va male a scuola e ha problemi di comportamento (la notte prima della partenza da New York tenta di uccidere il gatto di casa).
Una casa più grande, col giardino, dove vivere più sani e più felici tutti e tre, una scuola migliore per il figlio, un lavoro più soddisfacente...

Il sogno americano che man mano, invece, si trasforma in un incubo.


Edith e il marito.

Circa sette anni dopo il marito la lascia per una donna più giovane, e il figlio, da bambino problematico è ormai un adolescente alcolizzato e delinquente.
Come se non bastasse, a vivere con loro si è anche trasferito un vecchio zio del marito, malato e avaro: Edith rimane sola, non si ribella e continua a occuparsi di lui.
Nelle pagine del diario di Edith c’è posto solo per una “realtà” tutta diversa, rosa, serena, soddisfatta: il figlio è diventato un brillante ingegnere, si è sposato e la nuora è deliziosa, presto arriva anche una nipotina adorabile…


Edith e il figlio adolescente. Highsmith era molto scontenta del film: per esempio, giudicava “una stronzata edipica” il cambiamento che rendeva il figlio innamorato della madre, aspetto del tutto assente nel romanzo.

Lo scollamento tra il quotidiano e le pagine del diario va oltre una comprensibile valvola di sfogo. È la costruzione di una realtà parallela, che non può non determinare incrinature e slittamenti nel comportamento e nella psiche di Edith: le stranezze di Edith cominciano a essere notate da chi le sta intorno, tranne che da lei, cominciano a diventare qualcosa di più che solo eccentricità, iniziano a connotarsi come follia.

Intanto John Kennedy viene assassinato, intanto la guerra in Vietnam divampa, intanto Nixon e lo scandalo Watergate.


Ancora col marito.

Una Highsmith insolita, un thriller più psicologico che giallo, di un’attualità inquietante.
L’analisi implacabile di una vita non eccezionale che si consuma per mancanza di amore e felicità.
Per qualcuno il suo capolavoro, per altri un suo romanzo minore.
Secondo me l’ennesima dimostrazione di quanto questa scrittrice fosse brava e unica.


Il nipote e il vecchio zio.

[Robin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dear Diary,

Today I read a book by one of my all time favourite writers, Patricia Highsmith (or Pat, as I like to call her - I like to think we're on friendly terms, and we are, when we have imaginary conversations together). The book is Edith's Diary, and it was published in 1977 - a good year, or so I'm told.

Oh, diary! I had such high hopes! Just the title sounded so... juicy. I was expecting another wicked ride from dear old Pat.

At first, all signs pointed to a "win". Edith and her husband Brett move to the Pennsylvanian countryside with their thoroughly creepy ten year old, Cliffie. Oh, how I cringed and cowered every time Cliffie got near the cat! How I flinched when he passed old Uncle George on the stairs! Something terrible was going to happen, dear diary, I just knew it.

But it didn't take too long before I realized this book wasn't going where I thought it might go. Gosh, I know that Pat is fond of slow beginnings, but this book took that concept to new heights, and spanned many years. Cliffie is a 10-year old at the book's beginning, and by the time we reach the 1/3 mark, he's in his 20s, and still, not much has actually happened!

Diary, here's where I'm going to complain a bit about my Grove Press edition of this book. Not only were there multiple typos throughout the novel, but the summary on the back cover mentions spoilers that happen well into the book, including one detail that doesn't happen until the final 40 pages!

Anyway, as I said, this is a departure for Pat, in that it's not really a psychological thriller, like many of her other books. It's more of a character study, with psychological tension throughout, and once I identified that, I enjoyed the ride. Her writing is so fine, I ploughed through the almost 400 pages in two days!

But once I finished the book, oh, I was perplexed. Poor Edith goes into a descent towards madness, which is so interesting, and who doesn't love a diary filled with lies?? But the main reason for Edith's cracking up, is her husband leaves her for a younger woman. Really, Pat? I'm a little disappointed that PAT, of all people, would write a character who comes undone because she doesn't have a man. Puuuulease. Why isn't she cackling and cracking open a bottle of champagne, instead??

And what a waste of her ridiculously icky character, Cliffie. Cliffie could have been a bang, but was a whimper, in the end. Diary, I adore Pat, you know I do, but I would have written this sooooo much differently. Oops, should I have said that? Who do I think I am, anyway?

Still, I am so glad I read it. I love being in her pages. She reminds me of why I write. She's another literary friend I return to, for commiseration and inspiration.

Well, I better go, diary. These books won't read themselves.

Love,
Robin

[notgettingenough · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having read most of Highsmith's books and being an inveterate reader of books about misfits and sociopaths, I was completely taken aback by my reaction to this. I felt so close to the protagonist that, although I kept Highsmith's books at the time, after a while I had to make this one leave home. It made me way too uneasy to have it close by.

I was having a slightly difficult life when I read it. I expect now it wouldn't scare me to death. Still, my feeling is that this is not a book to read if you are in the depths of despair. Be advised.

[BrokenTune · Rating 4 out of 5]

His mother was fighting a losing battle, Cliffie thought, because she was trying to fight the majority. The majority wasn’t even fighting back, it was just indifferent.

Oh, gadz, I wanted to hit most of the characters in this story. Repeatedly. With a shovel. Not only was this story of the suburban dream more of a nightmare, but Highsmith's detailed character description made the characters come to life more than I cared for.

Edith is looking forward to the prospect of moving from New York to Brunswick Corner, a small town in Pennsylvania, where she hopes to settle with her husband and son into a calmer more wholesome life. But soon the suburban dream falls apart as the model family shows cracks:
Edith's son, Cliffie, is a despicable little horror (he tries to kill the cat a couple of times and that is just the start). Her husband turns out to be self-righteous, selfish coward. And Edith is left to bear the strain of all of it.

What makes the book truly miserable is the way that Edith's cracking up is dealt with by the people around her, and so her keeping a diary, where she records a fantasy of a perfect life she imagines, becomes the symbol of her madness, her rebellion, as well as of the way society hides what is perceived as the imperfect, the damaged.

This is one of the most political works I have read by Highsmith. It heavily features Edith's (not necessairly the author's) thoughts on the Kennedys, the Vietnam War, Nixon, Watergate, etc. as a backdrop to Edith's alienation with her suburban neighbours.

Even tho I found it compelling, Edith's Diary is not a book I would recommend easily. It just really too depressing and frustrating to pass on to a friend. However, for the Highsmith enthusiast, this shows another side of her writing where she explores the connection between societal norms and psychological derangement.

[Ludmilla · Rating 5 out of 5]

Edith’in Güncesi çocuklarını yetiştirecekleri ve huzur içinde yaşayacakları uygun ortamı bulmak için New York’tan taşraya taşınan bir ailenin öyküsü. Romanın odağında isminden de anlaşılabileceği gibi Edith var. Edith yazan, dergi çıkaran, toplumda görece aktif, üretken bir kadın. Bunun yanı sıra evine ve ailesine de bakıyor. Bir de güncesi var, hayatının kaydını tutmaya çalıştığı ancak çok düzenli yazmadığı. Oğlunun başarılı olmaması, hiçbir şeye arzu duymaması, hiçbir şey için çaba göstermemesi ise tek sorunu Edith’in. Sonra bu sorunlar büyüyecek, kitap Edith’in hayalkırıklıklarının bir toplamı olacak. Onu bu hayalkırıklıklarıyla dolu yaşamından uzaklaştırabilen tek şey ise güncesi olacak.

Highsmith’in her karakteri incelikle işlediği, sıradan görünen bir ailenin dağılmasını bile gerilimi hiç düşürmeden anlattığı bu kitabı çok sevdim. Ripley ile birlikte Highsmith En İyiler listesinde en başa yerleşti hemen. 5/5

“Gerçek cehennem, düşle gerçek arasındaki farktır.”

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

She thought of injustice, felt her personal sense of injustice combined now with the crazy complex injustice of the Viet Nam situation

.
This feels like an unusual Highsmith to me as it eschews the high drama of the Ripley books, Strangers on a Train and even Carol/The Price of Salt, and instead plays in the domestic grotesque space that authors such as Shirley Jackson and even Celia Fremlin have made their own.

The title is slightly misleading as though Edith's diary has a constant presence, it's a rather downplayed element and doesn't really take on its symbolic significance of the increasingly yawning gap between what's in Edith's head and objective reality until close to the end.

What is striking is the extent to which Highsmith marks the progression of the narrative with big events in American history and culture: McCarthyism, Vietnam ('a large photograph of a Vietnamese child, mouth open, wailing'), the Kennedy assassinations, Jackie Onassis, Nixon, Watergate ('the Watergate disgrace'), the Allende killing ('with Allende murdered, thanks to CIA pressures and usual USA skulduggery') - noticeable both for the lack of equivalent time markers in, say, the Ripley books, and for the unabashedly Left-wing views that Edith holds, even if she does become increasingly authoritarian in her outlook.

The humour is black: just look at Edith's proposed 'Presidential Election' game where candidates get assassinated... we laugh rather uneasily, but given the named deaths of JFK, Bobby Kennedy and Allende in the text, it's hollow laughter that hides an unspoken truth.

Much has been written about representations of women and 'madness', not least the way it might be connected to the increasing burden of care placed on women tying them to the domestic sphere even when they work outside the home: and here epitomised with rather gleeful descriptions of George, his bedwetting and worse. Brett, Edith's husband, moved his uncle George into their home, then does nothing to help manage his increasing demands, his growing incapacity and inability to leave his bed. All falls to Edith - and even George's money goes to Brett rather than Edith. With a possibly psychopathic son, still at home at 27, and doing no more than part-time jobs and ignored by his absent father, is it any wonder women are, literally, driven mad?

On top of this personal pressure, the book depicts an America morally adrift so that, again, Edith's desire to turn away from political folly, to create a warmer, safer, controllable world within her diary fantasies, looks increasingly and disturbingly more like sense in an insane world. If, as many academics have claimed, dissent and revolt against the status quo, overwhelmingly gendered masculine in this book, is often culturally represented as 'madness' in women, then Highsmith's Edith might productively sit alongside Antoinette from Wide Sargasso Sea and Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar.

[Jean-Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph." —Thomas Paine, The Crisis

Annoyingly relevant, isn't it? Edith Howland has part of it hanging on her wall at the height of McCarthyism, and all Americans who aren't part of the pedo protection cult would do well to remember it during this fucked-up time.

Edith's Diary opens in 1954 and spans twenty years, although I think Highsmith handles the timeline a little awkwardly, especially given a book like Richard Yates's The Easter Parade, which was published a year before this one and flawlessly spans decades. Here ten years pass in the first fifty rather tiresome pages, and Highsmith often signposts the years by having Edith remember events we read about half a dozen chapters earlier, or never encountered at all. She finds her rhythm, however, and as the book progressed Edith grew on me to such an extent that by the end I hated every single one of the condescending and self-righteous men interfering in her life. Journalism, sculpting, alcoholism, and mid-century suburbia—checks the title page—nope, it still isn't a Yates novel. The humor is dark and pretty quirky, and it's the first book I've read in which a guy's come socks are a plot point. Where, I wonder, had Highsmith stumbled on this detail?

Not a thriller—not in the traditional sense—which I knew going into it. Prominent political events mainly denote the passage of time and contribute to Edith's mental state, which is said to be deteriorating partly because what she says makes those around her uncomfortable. Sometimes rightly so—such as during her deeply racist rant. But how many Americans are presently said to be overreacting for recognizing that the US is in the midst of a fascist takeover? Just wondering. It can and is happening here. The book ends just after Nixon's resignation—we'll never be so lucky—and had Edith been living in 2025, she would undoubtedly have wanted to shove fountain pens in her ear holes every time the orange pedo opened his Bubba-worshipping mouth—luckily I own no fountain pens. Highsmith's politics, especially later in life, were rather contradictory, but still she manages to hit the nail on the head regarding the pathetic state of America—then and in the present day:

In New York people say politics don't interest them. 'What can I do about it anyway?' This is the attitude government powers in America want to foster and do. News is brief, filtered and slanted. The Guatemalan 'uprising' would have been far more interesting if social conditions there had been described and if United Fruit Company's activities had been exposed - by radio and TV. Discussion clubs should be set up all over America to talk about forces behind things. We have been brainwashed for decades (since 1917) to hate Communism. Reader's Digest has never failed to print one article per issue about the inefficiency of anything socialized, such as medicine. From the American news media we have snippets without scenery, character or background. How could it be 'interesting'?

And as regards the Nixon/Trump playbook:

All they had been talking about seemed so unimportant compared to Nixon's save-my-skin tactics now, the fact that a powerful country had no leadership now. Nixon was promising a total pull-out from Viet Nam, announced figures proudly - 'Another five hundred home this week!' - because the country was full of people like the Johnsons who wanted their sons home, of course, but Nixon made no comment on the philosophy or strategy of being in Viet Nam in the first place or of pulling out now. Now that he was scared about his office, he was going to China to fill the TV screens with pictures of himself on the Great Wall, no doubt, and using chopsticks. Shades of George Orwell and 1984. Distract the public from the real issues!

I don't usually associate Highsmith with poetry, but I enjoyed Edith's poem, especially given the ending. Human beings are hypocrites, fickle and false, nature is not.

At dawn, after my death hours before,
The sunlight will spread at seven o'clock as usual
On these trees which I know.
Greenness will burst, dark green shadows yield
To the cruel-benign, indifferent sun.
Indifferent will stand the trees in my own garden, Unweeping for me on the morning of my death.
Same as ever, roots athirst,
The trees will rest in breezeless dawn,
Blind and uncaring,
The trees that I knew,
That I tended.

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

I must start by saying that reading Patricia Highsmith is always an experience. She seems to thrive on testing the limits, on taking that one wobbly step over the line long ago burnt in the sand by the rules, the norms.

Even though holding such high expectations, she still managed to surprise me by being more… concealed than usual. There’s nothing straightforward – or perhaps there is nothing but straightforwardness and we are simply not taught to recognize it as such – about Highsmith’s novels, and yet there’s something even more particular about Edith’s Diary.

Imagine you are at someone else’s place. You have been told to wait for your hosts on their immense library on the second floor. It’s an old Victorian house and the steps creak as you climb your way up. You find the room without much trouble and your eyes travel the universe of displayed spines in wonder. You presume the old floorboards will inform you of their impending appearance when the time comes. However, their steps are light and you only realize they have arrived when you turn to find them already staring at you in the face, no warning whatsoever. You almost jump out of your skin, covering the embarrassment with an apologetic smile. You can’t help but wonder though, how did that happen? That is how I would describe reading Edith’s Diary, but it somehow feels as if you are both the one left waiting and the approaching hosts.

If I had to choose one single word to describe this novel I would go with restless. I wouldn’t recommend reading this one before bed. I became rather agitated as I both waited and found my way up the stairs. It was truly one of those experiences that I will not soon forget.

I would say that Edith is, first and foremost, grieving. Not just the physical death of her loved ones, but also the death of her marriage and of her many daydreamed could have beens. I find it incredible how Highsmith seems to make the reader blend with Edith. Is she becoming insane? Are we becoming insane? I believe Highsmith would reply with a rather smug, aren’t we all?

[Kansas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Me declaro una fan empedernida de Patricia Highsmith aunque después de una novela suya, siempre tengo que leer algo completamente diferente porque los libros de la Highsmith son claustrofóbicos y te atrapan de tal forma, que al acabarlos, sus personajes y sus ambientes perduran connmigo durante dias y dias sin poder quitartelos de la cabeza. En este caso concreto, el personaje de Edith es en mi opinión su personaje más logrado. Una mujer que no puede gestionar lo que le va deparando la rutina diaria, y poco a poco va construyendo un mundo paralelo ¿dónde está lo real y lo imaginario?? Además, la Highsmith hace una critica social y politica durisima y se carga el sueño americano de un plumazo. Su mejor novela y la más madura.

https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2019...

[Juan Nalerio · Rating 3 out of 5]

¿Tiene la vida una finalidad? No, se contesta Cliffie el hijo de Edith, la protagonista de esta angustiante y pesimista novela. La vida es una broma.

“El diario de Edith” narra el declive y la caída de una familia y una mujer en la Norteamérica del Watergate, de Vietnam, de la dicotomía capitalismo-comunismo. Highsmith tiene buena mano para describir situaciones banales en las que se palpa que algo más va a pasar, lo que se describe tiene un trasfondo oscuro, sórdido.

Los pensamientos y acciones de Edith se disparan en todas direcciones, se torna vulnerable y sus momentos de satisfacción son devorados por su esposo inconforme, su hijo indomable, un visitante molesto, amigos que no lo son. La depresión lentamente se apodera de su mente y las anotaciones en su diario pasan de reales a fantasiosas.

La protagonista, poco a poco, siente un abismo negro y peligroso a su alrededor. El vacío se apodera de ella. La soledad es aterradora. Imposible no sentir empatía por el personaje.

El final, lo que estamos esperando con ansias a medida que el thiller sicológico transcurre, sorprende. Era lo necesario.

[Troy Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyable. Funny in parts, unsettling and ultimately quite sad. Highsmith has such a skill at slowly ratcheting up the unease.

[La Petite Américaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me like 8 months to get through this tiny little book.

Why? Because Patricia Highsmith is insane, that's why. This story was so tragic that it gave me nightmares, forcing me to read it in small chunks.

This is a great book in the same way The Bell Jar is: Amazing, but would you really recommend it to a friend? Solution: recommend it to an enemy. :)

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Frank Perry's incisive-but-cold film 'Diary of a Mad Housewife' was released in 1970. It's easy to speculate that Highsmith may have seen that film prior to the writing of this incisive-but-cold, 1977 novel. If, in fact, she did, the author may have thought to herself, 'You want the mental breakdown of a housewife? *I'll* give you the mental breakdown of a housewife. Highsmith-style.'

This was new ground for Highsmith: a marriage with a child. I've read most of her novels and a good many of her short stories. Occasionally (as I recall), there is a child here and there in her work but I don't recall any as toxic (or as present) as this novel's Cliffie: a chronic malcontent, Cliffie was born to oppose; he is agreeable to next-to-nothing; he lives to be accommodated; an only child, he eventually also lives at home well into his 20s.

He's basically a nightmare - not as unnerving as Rhoda Penmark in 'The Bad Seed' (he doesn't actually kill people... or does he?), but he's perpetually unpleasant and something of a noose on the necks of his parents.

It's those considerate parents who removed Cliffie from the Manhattan backdrop of Perry's film so that he might have a more 'normal' life in bucolic Pennsylvania. But Cliffie doesn't take well to 'bucolic'. He doesn't take well to *anything*. He's programmed to be contrary. And, sadly, in his passive-aggressive way, he dominates the novel.

But, such as it is, there's more going on in Highsmith's story. There's mainly Edith's deterioration. It's slow, systematic, and it takes its good, repetitive time in reaching completion. It's slyly insidious, dealing as it does in malleable relationships and Edith's own, vigorously insular nature.

We realize early on that Edith is not onto herself. We know because, off and on for years, she has kept the diary of this book's title. And she partially lies to it; failing to include most of what's messy in her life while inventing an alternate reality more in keeping with what's socially respectable. She is circumspect about her self-deception, viewing the entries as for her own uplifting benefit and, therefore, harmless.

Except they aren't. Edith is coming undone:

Edith felt for the first time an abyss beneath her, around her, black and dangerous. She had a sense of empty time, lots of time, years, months, days, evenings. She was reminded more strongly, she felt more strongly than when she had written the sentence maybe twenty years ago, that life really had no meaning, for anyone, not merely herself. But if she herself were alone, was going to be alone, then the meaninglessness was going to be that much more terrifying.

And yet, in a number of ways, Edith is a sympathetic character. Her particular (not exactly clinical) eccentricity aside, she is high-functioning, practical and admirably resilient. ~ to the point where it becomes apparent that Highsmith seems to be getting at something more than an emotional breakdown.

~ which is why your feeling about this book may be residual. You may (as I did) find the actual reading experience somewhat tedious and simultaneously compelling - but you may not know why... until after you're done. It's then you may contemplate the lives of those unfortunates for whom life is an inordinate series of curveballs. Are we able to circumvent what has the power to vex... and what's bound to happen if we can't rise above and, instead, cave?

As her career progressed, Highsmith's novels became much more 'leisurely', perhaps in a conscious effort to explore different types of psychological thriller. The books became much less terrifying than, say, 'The Talented Mr. Ripley' and 'Strangers on a Train'. She seemed to gradually seek the appalling in the mundane.

'Edith's Diary' is largely mundane. I'll admit to becoming impatient with it from time to time - perking up when its damn-few (peripheral) pleasant characters make appearances. Still, its atmosphere of quiet desperation is largely well-observed, even if the completeness of its oppression can come across as a bit thick and overly calculating.

Highsmith would return to being more overtly effective 6 years later, with 'People Who Knock on the Door'.

Side Note: It's a small point but, for a lesbian writer, it's odd to see Highsmith - 8 years after the Stonewall Riots in NYC - needlessly using words like 'faggot' and 'pansy' to describe a waiter barely on the radar of the narrative (someone who doesn't even need a defined sexuality).

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book—very keen and insightful.

This book, which forms a nice counterpoint to Updike’s over-enthusiastic “Couples” serves as a depressing catalogue of the underside of the sexual revolution. Although most reviewers note the careful cataloging of Edith’s slide into crazy, I would like point out that it is not at all clear who is crazy here.

In my reading, Edith appears for the most part to be fairly balanced, and the actions of the people around her are unreasonable and horrible. Her ex-husband is gutless and heartless, her son is cold and sociopathic, and her government (i.e., America fighting in Vietnam) is filled with fear and paranoia masquerading as principle. Through this sh*t storm she soldiers on, keeping house, nursing a relative of her ex-husband, holding a job and saying good bye to beloved family members.

In this view, Edith could be considered the most upstanding person in the novel, for enduring events which would have thrown a normal person into an angry rage, and yet keeping her cool. Perhaps it is because she never slips into that rage that other readers consider her crazy, or perhaps they are simply accepting the view of the friends and neighbors of Edith within the novel, who, as time goes on, keep hinting that she needs medical attention (when she does eventually start to show anger about the government and her situation).

In this reading, Hightower is challenging us as to who is the crazy one: Edith, or the people around her who calmly tolerate the load of BS and selfishness that life in this suburb constantly flings in her way.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Edith’s Diary

Every 6 months or so I get a craving for a trusted and true novelist or story teller like Patricia Highsmith. So, I pulled down Edith’s Diary from my bookshelf without knowing too much about Highsmith’s life but enough to sense that it was unsavory in spots.

In discussions with a fellow Goodreads reviewer and now having read Edith’s Diary by her, I am once again encouraged to check out one of Highsmith’s biographies, for which I felt discouraged before because of the negativity of the biographer and the cantankerousness of the writer herself.

But, as you will see in Edith’s Diary, the beautiful flow of Highsmith’s prose pulls you along like a Mark Twain raft down a lazy river. That’s why I stuck with her story till the end. I often find that reading well written and true literature relaxes me in times of crisis or the niggling worries of everyday life.

So, what I’m saying is that this is not a thriller for which Highsmith is famous, although there is plenty of tension and of the high caliber kind but having to do more with expectations, doubts, and some outcomes.

It’s more of a multi-character study of men and women, young and old and juveniles, and especially hardworking and under-appreciated Edith--The fate of most women today, I feel.

[Oliver Clarke · Rating 5 out of 5]

The peak of low key bleakness. Staggering.

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read and enjoyed a couple of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley books quite some years ago, and it has taken me until almost a decade later to seek out more of her rather large oeuvre.  Edith's Diary, a psychological crime story, was the first full-length novel not featuring Mr Ripley which I chose to read.  The Virago edition, which was republished along with several other Highsmith titles, has an introduction by crime writer Denise Mina, which I found to be measured and quite insightful.

Since its publication in 1977, the novel has been highly praised.  The Times calls Edith's Diary 'masterly... haunting...  a book that lingers in the memory and constantly disturbs and delights.'  The New Yorker believes it to be 'a work of extraordinary force and feeling...  her strongest, her most imaginative and by far her most substantial novel.'  Writer A.N. Wilson says: 'Edith's Diary is certainly one of the saddest novels I ever read, but it is also one of the mere twenty or so that I would say were perfect, unimprovable masterpieces.'

In her introduction, Mina notes: 'Regardless of genre or form, it is touching on truth that gives writing well weight and profundity.  Patricia Highsmith is a great writer.  Her truths are not always comfortable.  They're not easy to own, but we know them when we read them.  We might flinch at what she points out, but we can't dent it. Truth not only makes fiction more believable, it is what makes reading potentially life-changing.'

At the beginning of the novel, protagonist Edith Howland is moving from her New York apartment to a house in the suburbs in Brunswick, Pennsylvania, with her husband Brett and ten-year-old son Cliffie.  Highsmith is perceptive of the effect which this upheaval has on their psychopathic son: 'The move was real, not something he had imagined...  Cliffie often imagined much more violent things, like a bomb going off under their apartment building, even under all of New York, the whole city going up sky-high with no survivors.  But suddenly this, their moving to another state, was somehow like a real bomb going off under his own feet.'  As soon as they have moved, Cliffie tries to smother the family's cat beneath the bedspread, the first incident of many in which the reader recoils from him.  Edith is very well informed politically, and has such an awareness of what is going on in the world around her, but her son's behaviour, and his unwillingness to do anything, leaves her baffled.

The novel begins in 1955, and spans many years.  A couple of months after the family has settled into their new house, Brett's uncle, a rather cantankerous old man named George, comes to stay with them.  It is around this time that Edith recognises she feels upset for 'a few hours at a time', with no real reason as to why.  She begins to record untruths in her diary, which is almost like a character in its own right in the novel.  After Cliffie is thrown out of his college entrance exams for trying to cheat, for example, Edith records that night that 'he thinks he did pretty well...  If he gets an 80 average, he'll go to - maybe Princeton.'  Immediately following this, she acknowledges her fictional entry to herself: 'The entry was a lie.  But after all who was going to see it?  And she felt better, having written it, felt less melancholic, almost cheerful, in fact.'  Edith does not keep her diary regularly, and has written in it sporadically since she was a very young woman.  She tends to note only when a moment of crisis has occurred, or something which she wishes to remember.  The untruths become more frequent; worried by her son's path in life, she invents a fiancee, and then a daughter, for him in her diary.

Time moves quickly in this novel, and often, several years have passed from one chapter to the next.  Edith's home life begins to crumble, and many problems beset her.  Edith's Diary is a great example of domestic noir.  The third person perspective which has been used throughout focuses primarily upon Edith, but also explores the private lives of her husband and son.  Edith's Diary is not quite what I was expecting; I thought that the entirety would be told using diary extracts, but actually, relatively little is expressed in Edith's own words.

The prose in the novel does tend to be a little matter-of-fact, and there is very little writing here which could be termed as beautiful.  That is, however, precisely the point.  The building of tension is apparent from almost the very beginning, and is well handled. Edith's Diary was not as chilling as I was expecting it to be, but I found the character development believable.  The novel has definitely left me eager to read more of Highsmith's work. 

[Susana · Rating 1 out of 5]

(review in english below)

Peço desde já desculpa a toda a gente que se sinta incomodada com o facto de eu dar apenas uma estrela a este livro, mas não consigo dar mais. Não gostei mesmo.

Não gostei dos personagens (com a eventual excepção de Melanie) nem senti que estivessem bem caracterizados - ou fui eu que não consegui compreender a escrita da autora...

A leitura não me deu qualquer prazer, detestei os parêntesis, utilizados para adicionar informações completamente inúteis, tanto para o desenvolvimento da história como para a caracterização dos ambientes e dos personagens. Também detestei o uso constante do diminutivo no nome de Cliffie, que deveria estar restringido aos diálogos. E metade do tempo passa-se a preparar bebidas alcoólicas e a bebê-las!...

Até ao final tentei convencer-me de que haveria uma qualquer explicação, uma reviravolta que dalguma forma me fizesse ver a história de Edith doutro ponto de vista - talvez me estivesse a escapar alguma coisa... Mas não, apenas um final sem qualquer brilho, sem surpresas, banal. Que desilusão!

Entretanto lembrei-me que já não tinha gostado do filme O Talentoso Mr. Ripley, principalmente devido à história, que é precisamente desta autora...

Não tenciono ler mais nada da Patricia Highsmith, nem posso recomendar a ninguém...

I must begin by apologizing to everyone that may feel troubled with my one star rating, but I can't give it more. I really didn't like it.
I didn't like the characters (with the possible exception of Melanie) nor did I feel they were well defined - or maybe I just didn't understand the author's writing...
I got no pleasure whatsoever from this reading, I hated all the parenthesis, adding completely useless information, both for the development of the story and for characterizing ambiences and characters. I also hated the constant use of the diminutive Cliffie, which should be restricted to dialogues. And half the time is spent preparing alcoholic beverages and drinking them!...

Until the end I tried to convince myself there must be some kind of explanation, a twist that somehow made me look at Edith's story in another way -I might be missing something... But no, just an absolutely bland and banal ending, with no surprises. What a disappointment!

Meanwhile I remembered that I hadn't like the movie The Talented Mr. Ripley, mainly because of the story, which is precisely of this author...

I will not read any more books by Patricia Highsmith, nor will I recommend it to anyone...

[KOMET · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Edith's Diary" is a psychological thriller that has as its focus what, at face value, is a typical, middle class family in mid-1950s America. It begins with Edith Howland, her husband Brett, their 10 year old son Clifford (aka "Cliffie"), and the family pet poised to move from their Manhattan apartment to their new house in Pennsylvania, a stone's throw from Philadelphia. Edith has high hopes that the move to a home of their own will usher in a new life rich in opportunity for herself and family. She takes with her a diary into which she has channeled her inmost thoughts and worldly observations. It is her most cherished possession.

Once the Howlands are settled into their new home and the 1950s recede into the 1960s, Edith strives to eke out a living with her husband on a paper to which both contribute articles and essays. One of Brett's relatives, George, a man of advancing years, comes to live with the Howlands. Over time, George's growing needs, coupled with the struggles Brett and Edith have in raising their son, give rise to a rift in Brett and Edith's marriage. Rather than growing together, Brett and Edith gradually grow apart, divorce, and Brett abandons the family for a new life - and love - in New York.

The rest of the novel shows, ever so subtly and cleverly, how over a decade, Edith retreats almost imperceptibly from reality, and manages to create in her diary, a reality conforming to what she desires out of life. I'm normally not a great reader of psychological thrillers. But I have known --- since the late 1990s --- of Patricia Highsmith's touted reputation as a writer of psychological suspense. And that is what prompted me, at long last, to take up one of her novels. I very much enjoyed the journey it put me on, and the surprising resolution to that decades long journey.

I recommend "Edith's Diary" to anyone who loves to read a well-crafted, slow boiling pressure cooker of a psychological thriller.

[Gabrielė Bužinskaitė · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know how the book affected me, I only know that it did. Ah, poor Edith. It’s such a typical human tragedy—coping, instead of living.

I'm left alone questioning things. Can life be wasted, failed, ruined? I instinctively want to say no, but am I deluded? Can your most honest effort and dedicated work get you nowhere because of the things you can't control? What then? Insanity?

Edith, like all of us raised on success visions, does everything right to get her share of the American dream. She gets a degree, marries, births a healthy boy, moves to the suburbs, works in a newspaper, spends time with friends.... check, check, check. Yet, as time goes by, we start to notice her efforts in achieving her dreams amount to, perhaps, worse than nothing.

However, while we notice it, Edith doesn't. Her mental decline begins with one, seemingly innocent, diary entry, where she leaves out the unpleasant parts. Then, she begins rewriting her experiences, adding extra details. As the story progresses, her diary turns fictional and Edith's behavior starts to concern those around her. Is that how madness forms? So... mundanely?

I enjoyed the writing and the "unreliable narrator's" perspective. I only wish the ending gave me answers instead of questions.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first Highsmith! A few funny observations had me laughing, and the ending was rather quite sad. Cliffie was such a character! It is like a homier version of The Golden Notebook. Anyway, there's a similarity. Very enjoyable and very readable.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Edith's life is not going according to plan. Her husband has left her for a younger woman. Her son is incapable of holding a job, and busies himself with drinking and fistfights in the local pubs. Her ex-husband not only left her, but also left his aging, invalid uncle in Edith's care. Edith attempts to remain positive. She is an avid journaler, and has created the ideal, perfect life for herself. The only problem is, it's only on paper and in her mind. Her downward spiral and depression is both bleak and beautiful. This is my first Patricia Highsmith and I'm hooked.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I become increasingly convinced that Patricia Highsmith has no real competition when it comes to determining Prime Potentate of 20th Century Genre Fiction. It comes close to feeling unfair to even call this stuff genre fiction, as though we are subjecting these literary masterpieces to a kind of unfair subcategorical ghettoization when we know full well that Highsmith is the equal (or better) of any number of the most exalted masters of self-consciously classy literary modernism. I am not the first commentator on record mentioning Highsmith in the same breath as Dostoevsky. How could I be? Naturally, when we make this connection we are usually thinking primarily of the Dostoevsky of CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. Dostoevsky’s novel kind of exists in two principal parts which might themselves be said to represent the two kinds of novels Highsmith herself tended to write. First CRIME AND PUNISHMENT is about the rationalizations and antisocial animus of a criminal mind in the process of talking itself through a series of transgressions, then it becomes a kind of cat-and-mouse story about this hapless guilt-wracked criminal, Raskolnikov, as he falls under the suspicion of Porfiry, the police inspector, the two men entering into a kind of vertiginous dance of entrapment and evasion. We could to a large extent split Highsmith’s novels into two categories: firstly those that detail, often with something close to controlled glee, the aberrant stratagems of twisted minds (DEEP WATER, A SUSPENSION OF MERCY); and secondarily the cat-and-mouse thrillers (STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, A GAME FOR THE LIVING, THE TWO FACES OF JANUARY, THOSE WHO WALK AWAY). It is worth noting that the cat-and-mouse thrillers always feature at least one character who is seriously pathological, and that even the more straight-laced characters in Highsmith are at least a little kinked. Additionally, there are novels which contain elements of both categories, THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY, her most famous novel, understandably so, serving as the most notable example in this regard. (The subsequent Ripley novels also fit this composite model.) Having now read EDITH’S DIARY, a relatively late Highsmith, originally published in 1977, I note both how it superficially seems to belong to the first category (in many ways resembling DEEP WATER and A SUSPENSION OF MERCY), but also has much in common with the even later FOUND IN THE STREET, both because it upends standard genre templates quite cunningly and because it focuses on specific American milieus with heightened attention to socioeconomic and sociohistorical factors. In many ways an extremely private (even outright domestic) portrait, EDITH’S DIARY also in large part demands to be considered a historical novel covering, and not only at the level of allegory, nearly twenty years of American degeneration. Beginning in the early 1960s, Highsmith lived entirely in European exile and often spoke in hostile terms about America. Her damning portrait of American life in EDITH’S DIARY—especially community life, married life, and child-rearing—needs to be considered as the vision of an author who was both queer and a voluntary exile from America. Of the eleven Highsmith novels I have read, EDITH’S DIARY is also distinct in being the only one that hews primarily to the perspective of a woman. It is crime fiction if at all only in the most cursory terms, reminding me above all of domestic melodrama, though forged in something like a darkly ironic register. Among my favourite American films of the Classic Hollywood era, I reserve a special spot for a number of masterpieces made by German directors in exile, especially the films of Douglas Sirk and Max Ophüls’s films CAUGHT and THE RECKLESS MOMENT (both from 1949). It is ironic in a sense that many of us esteem these films as highly as we do (Women's Pictures, as they were generally dubbed), since they were generally projects deemed thankless by critics and the studios which bankrolled them. The films of Sirk and Ophüls were notably subversive, finding subtle ways to undermine the American dream by focusing on socioeconomic determinism, women's subjection, and the constrictions of domestic space. EDITH’S DIARY operates in something like alignment, consciously or not, with this tradition. We might also think of the German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, outspoken on the influence of Sirk’s Hollywood melodramas on the films of his own mature phase, and especially his TV movie FEAR OF FEAR, which situates its heroine’s mental deterioration within the context of domestic imprisonment and the oppressive scrutiny of family. EDITH’S DIARY is a disarming masterpiece primarily because it is clinical, soberly constructed, and extremely sharp. If Dostoevsky’s CRIME AND PUNISHMENT is like a kind of judgment from on high, fundamentally paternalistic, offered up by a half-crazed visionary in dialogue with big ideas and wielding big ideals, Highsmith is far more sly, almost obsequious, and profoundly subversive. We may be reluctant to call her merely an author of genre fiction, but there can be no denying that a huge part of the thrill of reading her revolves around how she unspools plot and develops her characters, leading to the pervasiveness in her work of extreme high-wire tension, a component vital for any good thriller. Plotting is about the progressive elucidation of story (ways of telling), and the most basic law of storytelling is to keep the audience guessing, unsure where they are headed, routinely bowled-over by developments. If her world-modelling is brilliant, her characters fascinating, and her social critique trenchant in the extreme, Highsmith remains above all else a terrifically gifted storyteller. That she is hardly a moralist and relishes pathological aberrations that test the limits of amoral human agency means that the development of her stories seems all the more impossible to predict, as though nothing were off the table. EDITH’S DIARY is instantaneously one of my favourite Highsmith novels and a key work of the 1970s; I am eager to explain why I think that is, but when it comes to a novel like this I am extremely aware of not wanting to give too much away. The synopsis on the back of the book itself gives away a key plot point in its second sentence that I might have preferred it not have—specifically (uh, spoiler alert?) that Edith’s husband will leave her for a younger woman—even if this development does take place only about a quarter of the way into the novel. It goes without saying that reviewing this novel in good faith will require that I not give away too much. I am going to try and abstain from doing that. The novel begins in 1955. Edith, her husband Brett, their ten-year-old son Cliffie, and family cat Mildew (née Mildred) are moving from Grove Street in New York City to Brunswick Corner, Pennsylvania, “into a two-story house surrounded by a lawn with two willows in front and a couple of elms and apple trees on the back lawn.” On the surface this would appear to be evidence of a young family taking a modest stab at the American dream, ubiquitously constructed as this mythological confabulation would come to be in the halcyon days of the 1950s with its postwar boom and its LEAVE IT TO BEAVER-style social engineering. This particular family is eminently bourgeois but not wealthy. Brett and Edith are both writers, Brett a professional newspaper man. They dream of running a little paper in Pennsylvania and will go on to do so. “The healthy American liberal outlook, a bit left-wing.” But they also, uh, appear to read the conservative magazine COMMENTARY. (We may be inclined to recall Phil Ochs’s mordant introduction to his famous live recording of “Love Me, I’m A Liberal” wherein the great protest singer maligns liberals as “ten degrees to the left of centre in good times, ten degrees to the right of centre when it affects them personally.”) At any rate, when we meet her in 1955, Edith reads Orwell and reproaches United Fruit et al. in her diary. She submits a piece to NEW REPUBLIC called “Why Not Recognize Red China?” The diary. Edith’s diary, “brown leather” that is “grainy and tooled with a gold Florentine design.” Edith has abstained from filling the diary, in her possession now some fifteen years, with miscellaneous “trivia,” and it remains half empty. “The gold had flaked off to a great extent, but Edith had kept the leather oiled, and considering it was fifteen years old, the book showed only moderate signs of wear.” Originally the diary had been given to her, a young woman of twenty (a college girl in her “metaphysical” period) by Rudolf Mallikin, “who’d been about thirty (to her an older man)”; she’d told Rudolf she’d wanted a bible, which isn’t exactly the kind of gift a man would give a younger woman in whom he has a sexual interest, a fact clear to Edith at least in retrospect. “The more recent entries were apt to be about moods and thoughts.” Such as one, still salient, from eight years ago: “Isn’t it safer, even wiser, to believe that life has no meaning at all?” If this statement, to my mind not only betraying a keen mind but pretty much spot on, suggests a certain amount of ambivalence hidden beneath the surface, we might also surmise that young Cliffie, markedly ineffectual son, may likewise speak to something like maternal ambivalence (especially knowing what we know now about early childhood brain development). After what would appear to be an episode of a little light cat torture prior to Pennsylvania departure (smothering, ironically), we might even be inclined to suspect that Cliffie is something of a budding sociopath. Upon moving to Pennsylvania, there are early signs that things are a little … off. “A vague depression crept through her, crepuscular, paralyzing. Sometimes it was incontrollable, so much stronger than herself that she had wondered, even in the first few weeks she had been in the house, if it weren’t due to a vitamin deficiency or something physical.” The local doctor tells her she is fine, no anemia, heart is good, her weight slightly under normal, “which the doctor thought preferable.” This does definitely very much sound like something a 1950s physician might tell an American housewife. Little Cliffie certainly isn’t adjusting especially well, but then he has never been well-adjusted. Mom’s meditations on the subject of Cliffie can be outright malicious. Cliffie has little, worthless thumbs. “His ineffective hands seemed to proclaim that his grip on life or reality was nil.” Dad may arguably be even crueler, more rudely dismissive, more ashamed. A very decisive event occurs on that first Christmas in Pennsylvania. While Edith and Brett are celebrating Christmas with friends, Cliffie slinks out of the house and proceeds to leap off the Delaware River bridge. He will be fished out by bystanders and returned to his perplexed and enervated parents. The next day, Christmas day, Cliffie will return to the bridge in a superhero costume and for the first time the novel shift to his perspective. He is terribly proud of jumping off that bridge. As a dissolute man in his twenties, still living in that house in Brunswick Corner with his mother, he will continue to have occasion to recall it as his foremost act. Now, the novel is written in the third person, but not third person omniscient, primarily hewing close to Edith’s consciousness, very occasionally switching over to Cliffie, but at all times lacunae of knowledge are present, we don't know what these two characters don’t know or only half know (the narration not privy to more than the sum total of what Edith and Cliffie apprehend), allowing both for dramatic irony and various kinds of epistemological slippage. Another figure enters the picture. Brett’s uncle George, an old bed-ridden man, possibly a serial malingerer, who claims to have disabling back pains though medical professionals have no explanation as to why this might be. George inveigles himself into the home, becomes ensconced upstairs on a more or less permanent basis. Then, as mentioned, about a quarter of the way into the novel, Brett falls in love with his young secretary Carol and tells Edith. He explains that he knows the affair needs to end. Edith is extremely reasonable in the face of this unpleasant news, taking it in stride. Ultimately, Brett decides he cannot end the affair. He and Carol are going to move to New York and hopefully get married. He would like a divorce. He thinks he has a right to try and be happy. Edith isn’t super pleased about this, seeing the whole things as the pathetic cliché that it very much is, but also sort of agrees that she supposes Brett has a right to try and be happy. She notes almost drolly that it is unlikely that anybody would be inclined to stop and consider that she also might have such a right. Edith is left to run a household whose other members are Cliffie and George (who is not even kin). A grim situation. Still, she does not succumb to self-pity. She soldiers on. George will eventually need a bedpan and Cliffie is as unhelpful and abject a son as one could possibly imagine. Edith will run this household more or less until the novel’s conclusion in approximately 1973, with Nixon’s resignation and the not terribly honorable pull-out from Vietnam in the background. Her diary will start to perform a new role shortly after Brett’s departure. In her diary Edith will invent an alternative, happy life for Cliffie, in which he is a hugely successful Princeton grad with a beautiful wife (from appropriately good family) and eventually two adorable children, one of either sex. The New York Times review of the novel mentions that Edith is “betrayed by such ordinary dreams.” We might wish to be more specific: Edith, who is no dupe, doubles down on the American dream, having outsourced it to the realm of wishful fantasy, precisely as any evidence of its efficacy is being shattered all around her in myriad ways. There can be no doubt: the American dream is a malignant con, a toxic fallacy. Edith represents the kind of sophisticated, educated person who could of course be expected to see through this false and sterile national deception. At the level of her intellect she very much is! Her tragedy is born of her susceptibility at the level of the unconscious. Anybody reading a synopsis or review of EDITH’S DIARY is almost certainly going to be aware that the novel details a house wife’s mental deterioration. What I would caution you against expecting is some outrageous, operatic crack-up culminating in cathartic mayhem. Highsmith is far too shrewd for that. It would be too obvious and not nearly as satisfactory as what we do get, which is far richer and more unpredictable, delivered as a typically tense slow-burn. In many ways the novel actually at times becomes a perverse, macabre dark comedy about a monumentally unhealthy but kind of weirdly mutually-supportive codependent relationship between mother and son, both of them mindful of a quality of existential meaningless inherent to human endeavour as well as the presence of a precipice open before them. If in that early diary entry Edith took note that “life has no meaning,” Cliffie, the derisive slacker, will later echo her in his own internal musings: “Purpose? Life was a joke.” Cliffie’s defining act may be that reckless leap from the bridge, and during a visit from beloved aunt Melanie, Edith, realizing that a consequence of her abandonment is the dawning sense that the meaninglessness of existence is “terrifying,” suddenly becomes faint, experiencing a fleeting vision of “a valley, an abyss, worse than a cliff you walk over,” and in gathering herself together reflects that this vision has something to do with “her existence, quite apart from other people.” Both the single-minded me-against-the-world campaign to maintain a household and the pitiful fantasy world relegated to her study (her diary as well as, later, sculptures), serve as both bulwark against the abyss as well as the insinuation of the abyss through underhanded means. For many years Edith senses she is kind of progressively losing it. “I have the feeling that something’s—sort of cracking in me.” She senses that other people see it too. They would certainly appear to. She becomes increasingly isolated and paranoid. Especially in the 1970s, as her nation is itself becoming something of a paranoid mess. (Highsmith makes the parallel exceedingly clear.) If we might have expected this liberal woman to progressively become more conservative in middle age, timeworn tradition that such a passage constitutes, we would have to more properly say that she becomes something closer to a kook, certain of the inevitability of authoritarianism (so why fight it?) and writing outré essays for underground publications, culminating in a satire (or is it?) on political assassination for the then-still-super-edgy ROLLING STONE. Cliffie does at first seem like a malevolent, heartless little fucker. At a certain point, however, his complete indifference to the expectations the society places on him start to make him seem oddly sane. In the mid-sixties, the American incursion into Indochina just beginning, Edith considers the time capsules stored in bunkers in New York. “She was thinking, of what importance was Cliffie, his life, even her own existence, compared to the capsules? Compared to the whole human race and its achievements up to the year 1965? And here they sat, discussing a minor human failure called Cliffie.” Cliffie will prove too worthless even to be sent to Vietnam. That’s not exactly a bad kind of worthless to be! Edith knows that her life it pretty meaningless in the grander scheme of things, but what taxes her and pushes her past what she can bear is that she nevertheless has to go through the motions of not only living it but also of finding meaning, a perfectly crazy-making mandate. “Edith did not want to give herself the consolation of a cheerful hope. Best to expect the worst. And best to pretend that all was going to be well, too. How could one do both?” This is confused madness. Sometimes Edith’s madness looks a lot more like a sudden and intense plateau of clarity. This clarity, again, may perhaps be analogous to the clarity and peace of mind young Cliffie experienced jumping suicidally into the river from a great height. As a queer writer, Highsmith has a general tendency to depict heterosexual coupling in an extremely caustic way, generally productive in her work of various kinds of heinous manipulation and torment. We might also think of her self-exile from America as a kind of leap. She writes with sobriety, an almost ruthless sanity beyond considerations of morality, but she herself was a tormented and combative woman, by all accounts hard to live with. She also kept diaries. A diary might be an especially feminine object. We have a tendency to call such books “journals” when they are kept by, ahem, Great Men. A diary is a place for a voice that otherwise doesn’t have a place, a voice the is not considered to matter, perhaps like that belonging to a woman who nobody stopped to consider has a right to try and be happy equivalent to that of her gallivanting husband. It is the voice of a woman subject to campaigns of diminishing paternalism at every level of the society, every level of the political, private and public. This world: seemingly made for “odiously smug personages” like worried Brett and the psychiatrist he brings around to cajole and humiliate. Fairly early on in the novel, EDITH’S DIARY contains a brilliant throwaway sentence about menstruation following the itemization of some of Edith’s woes: “The curse to boot.” Yes, an explicitly female curse, one which men cannot experience. But this curse speaks to a greater female curse, the one that Edith has to live out, the contours of a life, which is not just, and may indeed prove to be unlivable.

[Blaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Halfway through I had thought I was in another writer's novel, but by the end I was confident I was in the hands of the author of the Mr Ripley books.

Chilling, and not in the most modern, comfortable, relaxed sense of the word.

[Moureco · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinante a narrativa do desenvolvimento da progressiva loucura em que cai Edith. Até mais de metade do livro, não nos damos conta de que é disso que se trata: do enlouquecimento desta mulher. É também assustador reconhecermo-nos em alguns traços daquela personalidade orgulhosa, desprendida e muitas vezes perdida no seu mundo interior. Patricia Highsmith, de quem já li 3 livros este ano (incluindo uma re-leitura) é uma contadora de histórias magistral!

[Estefanía · Rating 3 out of 5]

Edith es una mujer que forma una familia aparentemente convencional, sin embargo, el hijo se convierte en un parásito y el matrimonio cae en monotonía y fracasa. Inmersa en esto, tenemos a una Edith insatisfecha, con una voz que no exterioriza, incapaz de demostrar sus reales sentimientos, pero su diario será su puerta de escape y aunque al inicio plasmará la realidad, poco a poco irá distorsionándola y la convertirá en una fantasía, en la vida que le hubiera gustado vivir y con el paso de los años, esta dualidad entre realidad-fantasía se perderá poniendo a Edith en una situación límite.

Me ha gustado cómo la escritora logra trasmitir ese ambiente de hastío, de hartazgo y de insatisfacción en el que Edith vive. Además, el contexto histórico de un Estados Unidos enfrentado con Vietnam y la polaridad política de comunismo versus capitalismo ha estado muy bien relacionado con toda la historia. La parte final es vertiginosa y hace imposible soltar la novela.

Patricia Highsmith es una gran escritora, me ha gustado la novela pero sentí que por momentos se me hacía larga y un poco monótona. Le doy 3.5 estrellas.

[Florencia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can't say that I really LIKED reading it, but it was fascinating. It was an amazingly well written book that described a life that was boring and brutal. It was so real and because it was so real, it was unnerving. I find this type of books fascinating, intellectually engaging, but it is hard to say that I liked them. And yet, I am very glad I read it. There should be a different category for when you don't enjoy something and yet find it totally engrossing and engaging.

[Maricruz · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘Don’t think. Keep moving,’ was her frequent advice to herself, and she sometimes added, ‘Don’t look for a meaning,' because if she did look for a meaning for even half a minute, she sensed that she was lost, that she had turned loose of her real anchor which was not Brett, but a kind of firm resignation. Edith didn’t know what to call it, but she knew what it was, knew the feeling. The feeling was one of security, the only security she knew now, or had now.

A veces, cuando un libro te ha gustado tanto la primera vez que lo leíste, te da un poco de aprensión releerlo. Es lo que me ha pasado con El diario de Edith. Y sin embargo no creo que me haya gustado menos esta vez, simplemente me ha gustado de una manera distinta. Cuando era joven sentí una simpatía desbordante por Edith, esta pobre mujer que, como no tiene mucho de lo que alegrarse en su vida, se inventa otra mucho más feliz y luminosa. Ahora que he alcanzado la edad de Edith y tengo un hijo (aunque este no sea, a dios gracias, como Cliffie), ya no es solo simpatía lo que siento por Edith Howland, es, en cierto modo, comprensión.

Dicen que cuando Patricia Highsmith intentó publicar esta novela, se la rechazaron por que no le encontraban el misterio, la trama criminal o el suspense. Es el mismo motivo porque el que algunos de sus lectores la encontrarán aburrida o decepcionante con respecto a otras obras suyas. Pero si eres un lector atento y paciente, o si sencillamente te pilla en el momento adecuado, si no cometes el error de hacerte ideas preconcebidas sobre lo que un autor o autora en concreto ha de escribir, encontrarás en El diario de Edith aquello que, precisamente, Patricia Highsmith hace mejor: retratar con empatía a esos personajes que ya de partida no encajan demasiado bien en el mundo, pero a quienes un giro en sus vidas acaba lanzándoles aún más lejos de lo que la moral convencional entiende por bueno y saludable. Quizás debiera insistir en lo del momento adecuado, porque es una novela triste y amarga, y no siempre tiene uno el horno para bollos.

[Diana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Edith’s Diary [1977] – ★★★★1/2

“The difference between dream and reality is the true hell” [Highsmith, 1977: 291].

In this story, Edith Howland moves with her husband Brett and her young son Cliffie from New York City to Pennsylvania. The family is not rich and hopes for the best in their new community. Edith starts to run a political newspaper in the new place, while keeping in touch with her old neighbours in New York and her wealthy aunt Melanie. Pressure on Edith intensifies as her son Cliffie becomes first troublesome then passive and aimless in life and Brett’s uncle George arrives to demand attention to himself. Soon, it is evident that the life that Edith imagined for herself and her family does not quite accord with reality and Edith finds herself increasingly prone to fantasising as she writes in her dairy. What will be the cost of this fantasy? – Simple paranoia and mental health concerns, or maybe the complicity in the death of another person? Edith’s Diary is a nuanced, psychological novel full of hidden, but real fears, and a quietly disturbing account of a woman whose repressed despair caused by social and personal expectations may just surface to lead to tragic results.

Edith’s Diary shares certain similarities with Yates’s Revolutionary Road [1961], Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper [1892] and Levin’s The Stepford Wives [1972]. The common theme is life in American suburbia during the Vietnam War (1950s – 1970s), where some people live the lives of “quiet desperation” and “suffocation”, making their appearances of normality and conformity at whatever cost, even if their minds go to pieces behind closed doors. These are the lives that few people wanted to acknowledge at the time, but Patricia Highsmith certainty does want to highlight these. The message is that social expectations and roles sometimes lead nowhere. In this case, when a person does try to cope with the “Fall of their American Dream” through no fault of their own by choosing to follow their eccentric means, the society stops this behaviour and only gives them back the medicine of their own failure to chew for the rest of their lives. Given these circumstances, the most successful human being in the society will be the one who is the best actor, who does not think too much about the truth behind his life, presenting the right image to the world: “Where was the enemy? Who was it? It was right here in the house, Edith thought” [Highsmith, 1977: 174].

The main character here is sympathetic Edith. On the surface, she is an exemplary wife and mother who wants to be active in her new community, promoting intellectuality and knowledge. However, she soon faces circumstances beyond her control, including the unpredictable behaviour of her son, the “irrational” actions of her husband and the heavy burden of Brett’s uncle George: “like a boat (she thought) gliding smoothly to a shore, she moved closer to her worktable and sat down. But it wasn’t like that. If she wanted to think of boats, she was like a ship without a rudder now, without an anchor, turning on a dark sea, not knowing direction, unable to manoeuvre if it knew”. To maintain her illusion of control, Edith keeps repeating her own peculiar philosophy of life and keeps a diary that slowly helps her to erode the fine line between reality and fantasy to maintain her happy: “it was a fact that life had no meaning. One simply went on and on, worked on, and did one’s best. The joy of life was in movement, in action itself” [1977: 5]; “she didn’t believe life had any purpose, anyway. To be happy, one had to work at whatever one had to work at, and without asking why, and without looking back for results” [1977: 34]. Edith’s fantasies regarding her son become very elaborate in time and she retreats into her “make-believe” world as a number of deaths and betrayals in her life pile up. It also seems that not everyone is satisfied with day-dreaming Edith and she notices societal and familial opposition to her innocent fantasy world.

Edith’s Diary is a book that can be misunderstood. It is an intense psychological character study camouflaged as a simple and unpretentious family drama. Like many other books by Highsmith, it is not events themselves that make us intrigued and emotionally-invested, but the effect they have on the main characters as they slowly realise their tragic predicament. It is precisely the truth of certain realisations in the novel that we cannot deny that makes this book so good. This is the remarkable talent of Highsmith who can say everything while saying virtually nothing, putting her character through the paces that involve moral dilemmas. Did Edith become sad, mad or simply complacent? Or is her reaction simply that which a normal person would have experienced given her circumstances? All these questions are of interest to Highsmith.

📖 The power of a bit depressing but spellbinding Edith’s Diary does not lie in the language (Highsmith did not believe in beautiful language in literature), nor in the ending (it is too “neat”), nor even in the character study. Rather, it is the staggering overall effect of the novel which is undeniable. We expect something known and familiar, and yet, with Edith’s Diary, we will be served with something different and finer – we will be served with the truth, and we will certainly feel it.

[Ellinor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ediths Tagebuch von Patricia Highsmith ist das wahrscheinlich politischste Werk der Autorin, die sonst eher für ihre psychologischen Thriller bekannt ist. Zu letzteren gehört zwar auch Ediths Tagebuch, dennoch unterscheidet es sich relativ stark. Mir gefiel dies deutlich besser als das bisher von ihr gelesene. Der Text machte mich teilweise wütend, Ediths Schicksal am Ende kam recht unerwartet. Ein lesenswertes Buch, das (obwohl bereits 50 Jahre alt) noch immer aktuell ist.