‘You are living with a difficult person who is waiting to die’: my harrowing time as Patricia Highsmith’s assistant
I worked for the author of The Talented Mr Ripley in her final months. She was so mean and secretive, I imagined she wanted to kill meI first readPatricia Highsmith’snovels in the autumn of 1994. I was 20 and living in a room in her house in Tegna, Switzerland, that was plastered with bookshelves full of her first editions, organised in chronological order. Pat was 73 and knew she was about to die; she had been, it was rumoured, diagnosed with cancer or some other terminal disease. I was trapped in her world with her, trembling. She had weeks left to live and had spent so much time writing about how to get away with murder. I fantasised that she might try to kill me.The story of how I ended up in that house begins a few months earlier, in Zurich, with me on a blue tram, on my way to dinner at the house of Anna and Daniel Keel, a couple I’d grown friendly with. Anna was a brilliant painter for whom I had been modelling since I was 17. Her studio smelled like oil paint, instant coffee and the brine in which floated the mozzarella balls that she ate while working. She was a genius. Anna’s husband, Daniel – or Dani, as we called him – was a book editor and the founder and owner of Diogenes Verlag, a Zurich-based publishing house that was (and still is) a major publisher of European fiction. He was brutally honest but had kind eyes and piles of books that he used as furniture.Continue reading...