“Better latent than never,” said Ann Smith, the lovely painter Pat was sleeping with behind her fiance and therapist’s backs. Citing the “alcoholic who joined AA when he ran out of drinking companions,” Pat toyed luxuriously with “seducing a couple of them.” Pat’s psychoanalyst (spare a moment to pity the woman) was preparing her devious patient for happy heterosexuality by herding her into a therapy group of married women attracted to women. He was already beginning to irritate her.Īnd so the “The Price of Salt” - the first modern novel to offer its women lovers a desirable future - was imagined while its author was (a) engaged to a man and (b) attempting to exorcise the erotic obsessions that inspired her. Enterprising but ambivalent, she was auditioning another kind of redhead: the handsome British novelist she’d met at Yaddo, Marc Brandel. Senn and her reveries of redheaded Ginnie perfused her imagination in the same week she entered Freudian psychoanalysis. Only Patricia Highsmith could phrase a novel of life-changing love in the language of Jack the Ripper.
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