With her first two novels, Margot Douaihy has created one of the most memorable characters in contemporary crime fiction. In Scorched Grace and Blessed Water, her tattooed, punk rock nun/private investigator, Sister Holiday, solves crimes while following her vocation in the troubled, magnolia-scented streets of New Orleans. One of the things I love most about her novels is the way they draw on the tropes of classic crime fiction while creating something that is inarguably new.
Recently I had a chance to talk to her about another crime fiction original, Patricia Highsmith, and one of her lesser-known novels, Edith’s Diary. To fans of the Ripley novels and Strangers on a Train, Edith’s Diary may seem like an anomaly: an understated story of a woman who moves from New York to small-town Pennsylvania and gradually finds herself split between two lives—her real one and the one she’s created in her increasingly fictional diary entries. As Douiahy and I discussed, the quietness on the surface of this novel slowly reveals itself to be a cover for the violence that close family members can enact upon each other.
Is Edith’s Diary your favorite of Highsmith’s novels?
I’d say Edith’s Diary and Strangers on a Train are neck and neck, but if I had to choose, I’d choose Edith’s Diary for the disturbing and riveting qualities that I keep coming back to. We feel so much empathy for the characters here—not that we don’t have empathy for Bruno and Guy in Strangers on a Train. But what I’m totally mesmerized by in this novel is what Highsmith can do with the inner ecology of Edith’s character, and how she layers it structurally with the first person and third person. We experience it along with her as she becomes gradually more unmoored from reality and retreats into this completely distorted and contorted world. Something about it has the materiality of real life. I could see it happening, even though in a sense it’s so wild and extreme. And we have the experience of being completely unsettled, not knowing what’s going to happen next, which I think is the very definition of suspense.
When we were emailing earlier, you said that you saw this novel as a precursor to modern domestic suspense. I thought that was so interesting, because I don’t think Highsmith is often mentioned as one of the precursors in that genre.
I think when people think of Highsmith, they think of Strangers on the Train or the plot twists of the Ripley novels, which are endlessly ripe for adaptation. There’s a new Ripley adaptation on Netflix, which is fascinating and has a lot of fidelity to the original texts. Of course a lot of people have also seen Carol, which is an adaptation of Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, beautifully directed by Todd Haynes. But I think Highsmith should get so much more credit for laying the groundwork for the explosion of domestic noir, because she really was one of the forerunners. In Edith’s Diary, she’s showing us that the crime in this crime story is domestic life. It’s marriage and the pressures of the patriarchy. It’s pleasing her husband, taking care of Uncle George, and then the car wreck of Cliffie and his completely unhinged, somewhat monstrously unpredictable behavior. The domestic space is the crime scene. The novel was published in 1977, so she’s looking at some of these questions about societal change, the roles of women, what’s expected of a mom and of a caretaker. Then with the diaries, she’s giving space to these intimate and distorted narrative spaces. Edith can’t even be honest with herself in those spaces, and it shows the level of malady and hurt and pain that she can’t even face. The elements of what we love about domestic thrillers and domestic noir are prefigured in this book. I’m always trying to promote it, because I think it’s a groundbreaking text.
I’d never thought about it as a psychological thiller, but of course Highsmith wasn’t beholden to any of the genre expectations we have now. I think that’s one of the reasons why the novel still feels so fresh.
I think that’s such an incisive point. I mean, what’s the inciting incident of the of this book? Is it when Edith is born? Is it her marriage? Is it Cliffie’s birth? It really keeps so much room open for reader collusion, reader inference, and asking questions about why we tell ourselves the stories that we do.
I’m embarrassed to admit that this is the first novel I’ve ever read by Highsmith. (One reason I started this series was because I realized that I was woefully underread in the crime fiction classics.) Based on what I know of her work, however, this novel seems atypical. Do you know much about the composition of this novel or what led her to this character?
I don’t. I’m such a Highsmith stan that I’ve stayed away from her biographies, because I’d rather not know too much about an author I really love. I’ve read a few of her diary entries, which was interesting in terms of the context of this novel. She was a bit of a thorny personality, and there are certainly problematic areas, but I admit that I don’t actually know much about her as a person. Her work has been such a refuge for me that I just kind of try to keep it pure. However, some readers might see echoes of Highsmith’s own extremist views in the novel. As Edith’s mental health declines, she expresses some strange opinions, and it’s not entirely clear whether the reader is supposed to take them seriously.
The characters in this novel very much have a political consciousness, especially Edith and her best friend Gert, who run a progressive newspaper together called The Bugle. When her friends and family begin telling her that she’s acting strangely, Edith often says something like, “Why are you worrying about me when such terrible things are happening in the world?” It’s interesting how that state of mind has lasted, even when so much else has changed.
Absolutely. There are different schools of thought about whether crime fiction is or should be a space for polemics, or whether it’s just a story of a crime. I think that debate is important, because it gives us a lot of aesthetic variation and diversity of content. I personally think that crime stories are ideal places to examine questions of power. Edith struggles with the question of whether to look for meaning in her experience or to bury her head in the sand, and that tension ripples through this book.
Edith’s exploitation at the hands of her husband and son is arguably a crime, but the only violent crime comes late in the story and is somewhat ambiguous, to both Edith and the reader.
There’s almost a network of crime within the novel. There’s the death of Uncle George, but I think the more interesting part of it is the investigation of marriage and motherhood. We don’t have some of the classic signifiers that we have, for instance, with Strangers on a Train. The crime is Edith not having a sense of agency, not being able to speak up and have full ownership of her own life. When we see her drinking too much, and the lies and the duplicity, I think they’re all interconnected with the broken system that she’s a part of it. It’s broken on the macro level, and she’s broken on the micro level.
Earlier you characterized Edith’s son Cliffie as “monstrous.” He’s definitely the least likeable character in the book, but even he has his moments of humanity in the final moments of the novel, when he finds his dead mother’s diary and vows to “carry it around with him, hidden” for the rest of his life. What did you think of Cliffie as a character?
I think Cliffie goes to show that in these rigid systems, everybody pays a price. There are so many moments when the reader can invest very deeply in Cliffie. What Highsmith does across her texts is create characters with so much nuance, and so much so many contours and crevasses, that we get to access the deep dark recesses of the brain. And then we can also see sometimes why characters are set upon a path of either destruction or self-destruction, or both. And I think we could see that within Cliffie. Giving him that space at the end is really strategic, and quite gutting.
It’s interesting what you say about how this system hurts everyone. The reader has a feeling that this toxic suburban environment has pushed him as well as his mother into a role that he doesn’t really fit. There’s this one moment where he walks into Edith’s sculpture studio, where she’s been working on a bust of him that makes him look very handsome, and he thinks, “Maybe his mother liked him after all.”
Yes, and for me that bust really underscores the power of symbolism. Highsmith is known for the austerity of her prose on the line level, and she’s certainly not one for a flourish. But you can see the thematic development and the symbolic weight of that bust. She’s created this false idol, and then it contributes to her demise.
I hardly ever talk about endings in this series, because I don’t want to spoil them for people who might pick up the book, but I think it’s justified here. When I got to Edith’s death, I thought, “Oh, Highsmith didn’t know how to end it. She didn’t know what to do with Edith, so she just had her break her neck falling down the stairs.” But what you’re saying about the symbolism makes so much sense.
Yes, it’s a literal and a metaphorical descent, and that’s so typical of noir. When I think of noir, I think that all the characters are fallen—sometimes literally, as in this case. And everyone’s compromised. You don’t know who to trust, and suspicion keeps turning. Labels aren’t always important, but to me this is so clearly a domestic noir. All the signs right there, especially with the end and the actual descent into the abyss.
How would you define noir?
It can be so agile as a category. With something like Strangers on a Train, there’s an investigator, but it’s more about the texture of descent, as well as the psychological question of why people make these bad choices. Noir to me is all about humans giving in to their worst impulses and why. I could say so much more about it, but those are my favorite signatures.
You mentioned the drinking, which definitely stood out to me as well. The characters almost always have a drink in their hand, and I guess I read it as being typical of texts set in the Sixties or early Seventies, but did you see it playing a more significant role in terms of plot or theme?
I do. There is a lot of drinking, and it seems to serve as both a release valve and a coping mechanism, but then it’s also a trap. The characters are a little foggy and confused a lot of the time, and you can see that as part of the disorientation and destabilization that progresses throughout the novel. Of course it’s there as part of the culture as well, but that’s typical of so many things in this novel. They’re personal on one level, and societal on another.
I don’t think I’d recognized how deeply skillful and thought-out a lot of these elements are. She’s critiquing her own period in a way that I don’t see in a lot of mid-century American writers. Can you talk at all about whether this novel influenced your work? And if so, in what way?
On the craft level, it’s really inspired me. It’s very subtle, and even though that’s not my style, I’ve studied it very closely for how she managed to achieve those effects. I was just reading the back jacket again, and it’s interesting that the New Yorker called it “Highsmith’s strongest, her most imaginative, and by far her most substantial novel.” If we think of stories as these linear temporal phenomena, where we have to read one line in order to read the next line, I think this book is a fascinating case study in how subtlety and a slow burn can build to a devastating effect through very subtle choices. There’s ambiguity, room for inference, room for haunting, and it’s also just kind of a ripper. I don’t think you can read this book and not feel something. I think it’s quite an achievement on various levels.
As you were saying, your style is very different. I think of your work as much more maximalist.
But I love aesthetic variation. And I love when people do their thing and then double-down or triple-down on it. If it’s going to be a slow burn psychological thriller, make it the slowest, burniest, most psychological thriller it can be, and plant your flag there. The commitment of this book is just incredible to me. Also I think there’s a lot of beauty and generative power in the shadowy places, as paradoxical as that sounds. That’s what I love about crime fiction.
