I'm happy with the suggestions already made but if you're looking for others, we could try one of these (I haven't read any of them)

My experience in reading this very thorough and accomplished biography was a disjointed one, because, being in constant competition for my library's electronic version, I lost access several times for a period of weeks each time. This may have unfairly cost Ms Schenkar a star in my rating, because, with her unconventional though effective choice to arrange her biography by subject matter rather than chronology, I did find it difficult to re-orient myself each time I picked it up. (And, e-books being e-books, I didn't discover how to use the extensive chronology at the end until much too late in the process).

One of the things I realized as I was reading is how little of Highsmith's prodigious output I've actually read, not just novels and short stories under her own name but also various types of work to which she never owned or only, as with "The Price of Salt", only relatively late in her career. As a result, I was doing less "matching" than usual between the description of the life and the experience of the work, and was thrown more intensely into the details of the life itself. Blessings on Ms Schenkar for having synthesized the apparently massive legacy of self-documentation, in the form of diaries, "cahiers" and letters (not to mention a voluminous acquaintance ready and willing to speak). What emerges from all that synthesis, I'm sorry to say, is a picture of a truly unhappy and difficult woman who became increasingly anti-social as she aged (or perhaps counter-social, since she didn't exactly isolate herself, just antagonized everybody).

There are some very useful literary insights, especially around the inextricability of sex and death in Highsmith's work, and her invariable tendency to work in pairs of characters (something she shares with Wilkie Collins, I think). And though I can't think of anything in my own limited Highsmith reading that matches the sheer intensity (and viciousness) of her relationship with her mother, just knowing of some of that details of that particular inescapable love/hate does shine a light on Highsmith's darkness (as it were).

Schenkar is blunt in her assessment of Highsmith's stylistic defects: she has a "tin ear" and very little wit. In this, her biographer is her superior. I had to laugh out loud at this particular bon mot about Patricia's girlfriends: "Pat was still not sleeping with Chloe, but she would always prefer the bird in the bush to the bird in her bed."

This was, disjointed or no, a good read, and actually engendered in me a desire to read more of the works written by its subject. That's the mark of a successful biography.

I had four more bags of books to take into the UBS today, so I nosed around a bit while I was there - and look what I found!

Four matched Highsmith Vintage Crime editions of the Ripley  books! I couldn't resist them, and the shop owner told me that they were sold back in the last couple of days. What luck! 

(Original Review, 1995)

I remember trying to follow a DVD of Mr. Ripley one evening many years ago. I was at the time dazed by antibiotics and kept drifting in and out of semi-consciousness, so I managed to catch only the odd isolated scene with the angelic-looking cast, a golden trio swanking around a sunny, shimmering lotion. Matt Damon looked like a bespectacled, goofy nerd who had probably began his acting career in commercials playing the Milkybar Kid.

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.

Bruno had not wanted to go to Haiti, but it offered escape. New York or Florida or anywhere in the American continent was torture so long as Guy was there, too, and would not see him.

He's like a proto Ripley