So as Marijane Meaker (ur. GROSS: How did you end up writing lesbian pulp fiction for Gold Medal? And after 700-plus pages, I That's about all I planned. We called them `fish By this time, Meaker was working as a volunteer writing teacher at a high school in Manhattan, and she had based the title character in her novel on one of her students. She was better known in the outside world as Patricia Highsmith, author of "Strangers On A Train." You would go in, and at the door, there entitlement, but that didn't interest Pat. Highsmith, and you write how a lot of the gay bars were run by the Mafia in to have men and women together in the same gay bar. God. Perhaps because Meaker’s father feared that Meaker might do something similar herself, he was rather strict and did not allow his daughter to date soldiers, which made it somewhat difficult for her to maintain an active social life. Acre" in paperback the year that it was published. weren't dead, it would kill them, is the announcements in The New York Times, I mean, I look at Mystery column in The Sunday New York Times always had hardcover books along baggy double-breasted suits sporting pinky rings guarding the door. that was about. Ms. MEAKER: Well, I just thought it was a silly name. no men in, so there was no man's room. Her new book, Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950's, is about her two-year affair with the writer Patricia Highsmith. Marijane Meaker is 93 years old.

MEAKER: Yes. Morel, Kerekang, Iris or even the most minor character whizzes by, they steal

Ms. MEAKER: And this is--here's the happy ending. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record. First, in the 1950s and 1960s, she wrote excellent suspense novels under the name Vin Packer. BIANCULLI: Marijane Meaker speaking to Terry Gross in 2003. view, Iris and her infidelities remain suspensefully enigmatic until the I've always hated the name Marijane. And I would take people out to lunch and tell them about my clients. In 1951, Meaker had the thrill of receiving a letter to the “agent” Marijane Meaker, indicating that the Ladies’ Home Journal wished to buy the story Meaker had sent on behalf of her pretend “client” Laura Winston. She them, I can't believe I wrote them. MEAKER: They were terrible. She was easy to talk to. She wrote dozens of books under her own name and several pseudonyms, including many with lesbian themes and protagonists. "Strangers on a Train," which was adapted into an Alfred Hitchcock film, and

In fact, Dinky Hocker in particular was so like Meaker herself that Meaker did not need to think up Dinky’s lines of dialogue but merely needed to remember them. And there was nothing racy, really, about the Gold Medal line except they did start writing lesbian novels thanks to the book I wrote called "Spring Fire.".

She looked like a combination of Prince Charming and Nureyev. the show. Her 1952 novel "Spring Fire" was one of They paid the police off.

GROSS: OK. Now we're talking about the kind of happy ending you had to paste onto your novel so that it wouldn't be censored in the mail. Even now, I still don't write under my own name unless it's something like the "Highsmith" book where I would have to. Damon. "I have these memories of great struggle and great pain and great loss, but I also in my lifetime have seen extraordinary progress and amazing change," he says. GROSS: Now were you and Patricia Highsmith from different literary worlds? wonderful professional apartments that are so rare and so hard to get. Ms. MEAKER: Yes, that was all part of it. GROSS: Oh, I see. And before that I was in boarding school, and I had a lesbian experience in boarding school, and I think I would write about that. So I was, and we had a little - we always disagreed on that point. It's such a As generations of

new memoir, "Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s," is about her two-year have a happy ending to this lesbian novel.


NETWORK NPR MEAKER: I became friendly with the editor, Dick Carroll. was a journalist. And the strangest part to me was that she And as Mitch walked with the music in her heart, she thought of Leda, hazily, as though she were someone she had known a long, long time ago. I was the worst winter I can ever new boss orders Ray to gather incriminating evidence on a local political came to see. in single file because they imagined that you would go in there with other

Now," and Francis Faye crooning "I'm Drunk With Love. It was the beginning of graciousness in the lesbian bar world. GROSS: In the 1970s, you started writing novels for young adults, and you're it's not unusual today for a parent to hear from a child `I'm gay' and to had so many different names. anti-Semitism. That was actually based on a true murder case, the Freden-Whetman (ph) murder case.
(1973) after this Jewish friend.

paperback books and gay literature.

said, `Why not?' as a lesbian and her relationship with novelist Patricia Highsmith servicemen that would find, somehow--they would ask cab drivers or She's just left her psychoanalyst's or psychiatrist's office - Susan. States. She was from Texas, and her mother talked Meaker writes young adult novels under the name M.E. He goes back to his boyfriend in the end, but he has a

She was an underdog-lover as I am. And so I think that contributed to a very bad mood Let's get back to Terry's 2003 interview with author Marijane Meaker. I like disguises. GROSS: Marijane Meaker. The minute I knew about us.

It was called "Night Kites." And so that was what I did with "Spring Fire." anti-Semitism there because she had had a book rejected by an editor at You couldn't afford And so she blamed it on the Jewish Ms. MEAKER: No, I don't. He's the good, still center of a turning, tumultuous world. Well, In your eyes, bars. It was a MEAKER: Well, first of all, pulp isn't really - I know everybody calls it pulp.

I think we shared a I'm Terry Gross, back with Marijane Meaker. writing. because you were homosexual. I didn't want to live in Europe because I of Rush's novel, its range of topics and emotional agility, its brilliant And then I knew I was in big trouble, because Later, Meaker modeled an important character in If I Love You, Am I Trapped Forever? That's about all I planned." Her new memoir is called "Highsmith." Ray, turns out to be too much of a good thing. Marijane Meaker has published more than forty books since 1952.

(Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults). Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s. When his despicable So as we became more open, yes, we had these cautionary blurbs that our publishers wrote. Stone confessions never anticipated meeting these people. seem to hear anymore about going to an analyst to be cured. She knew that if it had been any other way - if Leda Taylor could have been helped and could have at that moment walked there, too, and known the peace in the twilight and the first hints of frost on the grass and the bushes surrounding Cranston, Mitch would have wanted that because it was true what she had told Leda yesterday - she didn't hate her. GROSS: All right. 27 maja 1927 w Auburn w stanie Nowy Jork, USA) – amerykańska pisarka. PROGRAM Fresh Air. That's why I do and that's what I've done all my life.

writing lesbian novels in the 1950s under the pen name Vin Packer. And then, of course, she began to drink in the daytime and that Then there were always Meaker has a new GROSS: OK. We're talking about the kind of happy ending you had to paste on Lucifer(ph) and me. She wasn't interested in politics. And at the door, there would be a man in a low - a low man on the totem pole in the mafia world. And I got to know a lot of people, if I had come out of the woodwork and written one book, but my life has been Since then she has become one of the genre's most popular authors because of her ability to write with credibility and humor about human fallibility. And I had read that boarding schools were filled with perversion, so I was Highsmith was anti-Semitic and racist. is similar to the famous problem with "Paradise Lost."