This rang true to me: all my life I’d turned my triumphs and sorrows-the disintegration of a friendship, a fight with my mother, my first kiss-into dramatic narrative moments. On a recent visit to my MFA program, the writer Danielle Evans remarked that there’s something about childhood and adolescence that lends itself to the climactic structure of fiction. Originally published under the pseudonym “Claire Morgan,” and re-issued nearly forty years later as Carol under Highsmith’s real name, the novel was pioneering in its happy ending at a time when queer stories tended to end tragically, condemning their characters to suicide or heterosexual conversion. The two women fall in love and set out on a road trip across the United States. Carol’s in her thirties and has been involved with women before, but Therese is, in modern parlance, a baby queer. The Price of Salt tells the story of Therese, an aspiring stage designer whose life is altered forever when Carol, a housewife in the midst of a bitter divorce, comes into the department store where she works.

I was reading queer stories to teach myself how to write one. With that realization came a creative breakthrough: that my manuscript, a multi-vocal novel set at an art school, was at its heart a love story between its two female protagonists. For months, I’d been reading my way through the queer canon, having realized a year into my marriage that I was bisexual. I’d just begun an MFA and was working on a novel, but The Price of Salt wasn’t an assigned text for class. I paid 99 cents, plus $3.99 for shipping. Last year, I bought a secondhand copy of Patricia Highsmith’s iconic 1952 lesbian novel The Price of Salt.

The price of salt 1952