{"id":101271,"date":"2022-08-18T09:00:24","date_gmt":"2022-08-18T09:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/news\/untangling-the-contradictions-of-crime-novelist-patricia-highsmith"},"modified":"2022-08-18T09:00:24","modified_gmt":"2022-08-18T09:00:24","slug":"untangling-the-contradictions-of-crime-novelist-patricia-highsmith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/news\/untangling-the-contradictions-of-crime-novelist-patricia-highsmith","title":{"rendered":"Untangling the contradictions of crime novelist Patricia Highsmith"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In Alfred Hitchcock&#8217;s 1951 movie Strangers on a Train , a man strikes up a conversation with a seatmate, leading to an indecent proposal. In Anthony Minghella&#8217;s 1999 film The Talented Mr. Ripley, a grifter befriends a spoiled playboy, then offs him when the relationship gets complicated. Literary critic Terry Castle says most people know Patricia Highsmith&#8217;s writing through screen adaptations, but her original stories are even more chilling and compelling. &#8220;The main characters do not make sense. They seem to behave irrationally at certain points, rationally at other points. They do good things and then they do absolutely horrific things.&#8221; The same might be said of Highsmith. Her story begins in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921. Abandoned by her father in infancy, a love-hate relationship with her mother left deeper scars. As Castle explains, &#8220;Her mother was very ambivalent about having her in the first place, and one of Highsmith&#8217;s favorite stories to tell was that her mother had<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Highsmith&#8217;s writing was full of fakes, forgeries and falsehoods, revealing not only what her characters concealed, but what readers were willing to see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,1],"tags":[90,19],"class_list":["post-101271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-literature","category-news","tag-books-literature","tag-entertainment"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101271\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}