Dry January Must Reads: Edith’s Diary, Patricia Highsmith, 1977

“Blast From the Past: Girls Gone Mad?”

Staff Pick, McNally Jackson, Williamsburg

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

It is a cautionary tale of suburban malaise in the vein of Hulu’s Fleishman’s In Trouble in its most recent incarnation. Both Lizzie Caplan’s character and Claire Dane’s show marks of Edith’s issues. Add a dash of the Real Housewives with non-stop cocktail hour and you are in for a wild read. But female hysteria/psychosis tales date further back than the 1950s unhappy housewives and even before Flaubert’s 1890s seminal work of females gone mad, Madam Bovary. Where Highsmith succeeds more than any other in this genre is that she keeps us guessing, “Who is the crazy one?” up until the final dastardly death.