The Talented Ms. Highsmith
June 11, 2025 at 07:30PM“I put what I call ordinary people into rather tough situations,” Patricia Highsmith once told an interviewer. “They seek, quite naturally, some way out.” During the fall of 1994, Elena Gosalvez Blanco took a job as caretaker for Highsmith, the acclaimed author of Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley, moving into her idiosyncratic manse in Tegna, Switzerland. For The Yale Review, Blanco details her weeks under Highsmith’s overbearing watch. Highsmith consumes little besides broth and beer, bristles over her young companion’s use of the phone, and insists that the house be kept dark at night, the two women navigating Highsmith’s domain by flashlight. Blanco finds her way out; Highsmith died in 1995, not long after their time together ended. Still, her account is a disquieting, psychologically complex portrait of their short relationship.
Pat did not let me use her phone to call my boyfriend. Whenever he called, she told him I was not there. I did not dare confront her, even though I was counting on him visiting, even staying over occasionally. One day, I worked up the courage to ask her, and she told me that he could not enter her house or garden; if I met him at the town bar, I could not be gone for more than an hour, in case she needed me. My boyfriend and I decided he should not come, since I couldn’t even get away to meet him in Locarno. We just wrote letters. The same went for my friends and parents. A letter from Spain took ten days to reach its destination, but she was clear that I could not occupy her phone line. When someone did call me, she would pick up the phone in her room, loudly clear her throat, and announce she needed the phone for an urgent call, which she then never made.
I did not question her rules or the assertiveness with which she refused to let me out of her world or anyone in, insistent that nobody could interrupt her routine or distract us from her bitter wait. I was weak and submissive, both because of a lack of experience and because of the constant fear that something might happen to her while she was on my watch. I obsessed over not bothering her and shortened my walks around town, tortured by my sense of responsibility, worried that Pat was unwell and alone or needed me to fax the same page yet another time. So I adapted to her ways, becoming just as isolated, always home with her or near her, accompanied by only her novels, waiting for something to happen. I was mesmerized by the perfect crimes she had created in her books, and given how angry at life she seemed, I wondered if she had ever tried to kill someone herself.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/06/11/patricia-highsmith-caretaker-ripley/
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