“Every book is an argument with myself,” she wrote, even if she had no desire for resolution. Rather, her work revealed the writer as she was, a multitude of warring selves — the public and the private, the moral and the degenerate, the loving and the conniving.

At least one close friend noticed how Highsmith also found equilibrium when painting or drawing, her inner demons quieted by her studies of shape and form and color. “We’ll never know how much she might have refined and enlarged herself as a visual artist had she chosen to follow that particular calling,” Highsmith’s lifelong friend and fellow Barnard classmate Kate Kingsley Skattebol said. “It was art, even more than love, that released her inborn creativity and showered her with torrents of joy.”*