A literary event: the devastating diaries and notebooks of a writer who was very protective of her privacy. These texts cover Highsmith's entire life, from her student days to her last years in Switzerland, and allow us to accompany her in her youthful doubts about her sexual identity, in the endless nights of New York's Greenwich Village in the forties −of drinks with various characters such as Judy Holliday and Jane Bowles−, in the first glimpses of this literary vocation and the early success of Strangers on a Train −almost immediately taken to the cinema by Alfred Hitchcock−, during her time at the Yaddo artist colony −in the company of Chester Himes and Flannery O'Connor−, in their long and convulsive love life, in the publication of their lesbian love novel The Price of Salt −later renamed Carol− under a pseudonym to avoid scandal, in the creation of sociopath Tom Ripley as the distilled fruit of her inner demons, in her addiction to alcohol.