<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Meaker is funny as h*ll!
Review: Although this is a bittersweet love story, it is told with a sense of wit and high grade storytelling. Of course there are the serious aspects of the intensely passionate relationship between Meaker and Highsmith. Meaker paints a vivid picture of a specific society in New York (and of city mice living in rural Pennsylvania) in the 1950's. Meaker is a talented raconteur and wonderful writer! I recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more about Patricia Highsmith, life in the 1950's (lesbian or otherwise), Marijane Meaker, a talented author in her own right, or a decent read. I also recommend Shockproof Sydney Skate to see how Meaker incorporated her nonfiction life into a fictional book. I read these books around the same time and I felt like I was back in time.
Rating: 
Summary: Glad she's not my ex!
Review: I like Meaker's spare style and terse chapters which remind me of a Highsmith novel or most fifties novels in general. It didn't have as much detail about Highsmith as I'd like and I don't really see anyone who's not familiar with Highsmith or Meaker taking interest in the story. To be honest even though I bought this book I'd only reccommend it to Marijane Meaker fans. As for the strictly Highsmith fans you'd be much better off with one of her novels or Andrew Wilson's excellent biography "Beautiful Shadow: A Life Of Patricia Highsmith" which reads as addictively as one of her own novels.
Rating: 
Summary: For Hardcore Fans Only
Review: I like Meaker's spare style and terse chapters which remind me of a Highsmith novel or most fifties novels in general. It didn't have as much detail about Highsmith as I'd like and I don't really see anyone who's not familiar with Highsmith or Meaker taking interest in the story. To be honest even though I bought this book I'd only reccommend it to Marijane Meaker fans. As for the strictly Highsmith fans you'd be much better off with one of her novels or Andrew Wilson's excellent biography "Beautiful Shadow: A Life Of Patricia Highsmith" which reads as addictively as one of her own novels.
Rating:
Summary: A History and Inside look at a famed lesbian relationship
Review: I liked the historic setting for this book, telling the reader what gay life was like in the late 1950's. Meakers story about her love affair with famed author Highsmith was revealing. Though not sure I would want my relationship written about in a book by an ex, it is still well done. This was a book of non fiction that read like fiction with a history lesson on top of it. It is a wonderful multi dimensional read that should be in everyones library. This is the type of book you will not lend out in fear of not getting it returned.
Rating:
Summary: Truly fascinating!
Review: I've heard such mixed things about Patricia Highsmith over the years. The comments about her writing have been very positive, but most of the statements about her personality have been negative. Here we get a fair and balanced portrait of a fascinating individual. But more than that, Meaker's book gives us an intriguing perspective on New York in an earlier era when social mores may have been somewhat different but timeless human dramas played out with the same abandon as today. This memoir is written in incisive, witty, and honest prose. As I neared the final pages I found myself reading slower and slower because I didn't want the book to end.
Rating: 
Summary: Warts and all
Review: Meaker met Highsmith in the '50's. Both were successful novelists - Highsmith had written the first of the Ripley novels, her Strangers on the Train had been filmed by Hitchcock, while Meaker was just breaking into hardcover. They fell in love. Meaker broke off with her lover to move to rural Pennsylvania (from New York City!) with Highsmith. They had two years together, before Meaker's jealousy (early on a friend had quoted Shakespeare to her as a warning: 'Trifles light as air / Are to the Jealous confirmations strong / As proofs of holy writ.") and Highsmith's alcoholism destroyed their relationship. In fact, despite a habit of remaining friends with old lovers, Meaker did not have contact with Highsmith for twenty-seven years after their breakup.
Highsmith seems to have been a terribly insecure woman; she was restless, always wanting to be where she was not, doing her best writing in (and eventually moving permanently to) Europe. The casual racism and anti-Semitism she voiced when Meaker first knew her, while perhaps not so uncommon in the 50's, had grown into a vicious hatred of Jews by the time they reconnected nearly three decades later. She seems to have had a very difficult relationship with her mother, whom she actually stopped speaking to later in life.
Meaker draws a compelling portrait of two writers, and how they tried, without ultimate success, to make a home and lives together. At one point, towards the end, Highsmith accuses Meaker of having imagined who she (H) was and being disappointed that she was someone else. Meaker admits the truth of this. While she has drawn Highsmith warts and all, she doesn't airbrush her own portrait, but gives us an honest account an affair that was likely doomed from the start.
It is also an interesting portrait of urban gay/lesbian life in the 50's, when "you could still be fired for being a homosexual, or lose your lease, your straight friends, your family -- even in a big city like Manhattan, you were safer in the closet." Even Highsmith and Meaker, whose families knew, if they did not accept, their lesbianism, and both of whom had published books about lesbians (Highsmith's The Price of Salt actually had the nerve to have a happy ending), felt guarded, out in the world.
Rating:
Summary: Glad she's not my ex!
Review: The book is an interesting account of lesbian life in New York in the 1950s as well as Highsmith's own life of hard drinking and restless yearning. Unfortunately, the style relies heavily on anecdote and innuendo and offers little insight into its enigmatic subject. The book ends on a particularly low note with an "epilogue" set twenty-some years later, in which we find a remarkable and unexpected outpouring of venom for the author's one-time lover. Perhaps this writer of "young adult fiction" should have stuck to her genre instead of trying to settle the score with a woman who was a quirky but far more talented writer.
Rating:
Summary: COULD NOT PUT IT [DOWN!!!]
Review: This is one of this year's BEST reads. Not only do you get a revealing look at what makes the writer of Ripley tick, you also have a wonderful history of gay life in the 1950's ... plus the trials of two writers living together. Meaker is funny, honest, and truly moving in her observations then and now about the writer and the woman, Patricia Highsmith. It made me want to read a lot more of Meaker's works as well as rereading Highsmith ...
<< 1 >>
| 
