Love Patricia Highsmith? Her life story will make you hate her. The creator of Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley was an absolute goer, according to a new documentary about her energetic lesbian love life. Fine, but what about her misanthropy, racism and alcoholism, asks Charlotte Mendelson…

Charlotte Mendelson salutes an underrated author with no time for happy endings or comeuppances

This startlingly ugly room is where I try to write. But, awful as it looks, the Useless Room, aka the Hopeless Room, represents progress. Until recently, I worked in a sea of Sticklebriks in the sitting-room

The author describes her best distraction techniques, the odd people she meets in the British Library, and the occasional triumphs of a typical working day

Flowers, pah! They’re just a waste of space. The novelist on why her garden is all about ‘growing stuff that I can eat’

I grow more than 100 things to eat, including eight or nine types of tomato, five varieties of kale, three kinds of raspberry, various sorrels, 10 kinds of lettuce and a few flowers, all edible

I'm watching a lot of early Dallas and The West Wing DVDs at the moment, because there is hardly anything on television, though I am becoming addicted to The Apprentice. It's just like early Big Brother, which I loved.

Eastern European soul food, for me, begins in Bangkok. Where else would one expect to find an expert on chicken paprikash? My family’s last surviving one lives there, with a street cat called Mango and her half-Thai, quarter-Indian, quarter-Hungarian-Jewish, entirely American grandson.

I don’t understand the point of garden visits. Why do ordinary people, the owners of mere balconies and tiny yards, torment themselves by touring other people’s grand estates? Nut trees, stables, ancestral compost heaps: I need no reminder of what I am missing.

Resolutions are for teenagers. Once we’re adults, we no longer need to start the year with self-loathing, failure and shame. Give blood, walk more, donate to charity, wear your favourite clothes, find a therapist, stroke pets.