Inspired by Claire Holden I went to look for a Patricia Highsmith novel I haven’t read for my summer tbr but I found her cat drawings instead. There is a whole ’Highsmith the artist’ rabbit hole actually.

Highsmith produced drawings, watercolours and gouaches throughout her life. She also did interior design, woodwork, sculpture… she loved to immerse herself in another element for a while. The woman behind Ripley spent decades filling notebooks with lovingly drawn cats, portraits of friends, and, less expectedly, studies of her pet snails. She kept up to 300 of them at one point, allegedly smuggled some across borders in her bra, and once wrote a story where pet snails kill their owner. There’s also a sketch called Marcel Proust Examining Own Bathwater, which feels like it belongs to a completely different Highsmith than the one who wrote Strangers on a Train.

Drawing, painting, modeling – in my case also making tables or other things out of wood – means that you live in another element for a while. For the writer, the art of the painter is something totally other, and wonderful: a picture can be seen and grasped and understood in an instant, whereas it takes much longer with a book or a short story… —Highsmith