The woman who loved Highsmith: in a memoir of her affair with Patricia Highsmith (The Talented Mr. Ripley), Marijane Meaker also outs herself as one of the era's talked-about lesbian authors. (books).

She wasn't exactly a role model. Patricia Highsmith may have written one of the first lesbian books to have a happy ending, 1952's pseudonymously penned The Price of Salt, but her private life wasn't nearly as uplifting.

"She fell in love with women who were mean. They ordered her around; they had a sense of entitlement," says Marijane Meaker, whose new memoir about the author, Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s, will be out this June from Cleis Press. "I was a fluke, just as she was a fluke in my life."

Thanks to that "fluke," Meaker has a unique perspective on a novelist whom most remember as much for her eccentricity as for her classic tales of suspense. Several authors have embarked on Highsmith biographies since her death in 1995, their imaginations spurred by such bizarre details as her penchant for carrying snails in her purse. In this account of Highsmith's life--one of two Highsmith studies to appear this summer--Meaker crafts a deeper, more complex portrait of the author of The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train.

"She went to pieces in social settings," Meaker says. She just got drunk. I think it had to do with a shyness about her sexuality, I really do. She was a little older than I was, and of course even my generation had terrible shame about it. We accepted the idea that we were abnormal and all the things that happened in the '50s."

No one knows that era's restrictions and indignities better than Meaker. Under the name Ann Aldrich, she wrote two classic nonfiction accounts of lesbian life, 1955's We Walk Alone Through Lesbos' Lonely Groves and a follow-up, 1958's We, Too, Must Love. As much as Highsmith is about a love affair, it's also a memoir of an intimate community forged out of cultural silence. Meaker tells of boozy bohemian evenings in Manhattan and Fire Island, of restaurants refusing service to women in pants, of the openly secret sexuality of such figures as Lorraine Hansberry and Jane and Paul Bowles.

"It was sort of fun and sneaky. I remember I used to go out with men and then come home at midnight, change my clothes, get into pants, and go out to the bars," says Meaker, who also wrote suspense novels under the name of Vin Packer. "That was the world. Once you found your crowd, it really wasn't the horrible persecution it sounds like now."

Meaker and her contemporaries changed with the times, becoming more open in the '60s and '70s. Writing as M.E. Kerr, Meaker even went on to tackle such topics as homosexuality and AIDS in books for young adult audiences.

But Highsmith, who left Meaker to move to Europe in the early '60s, seemed to descend into a state of permanent alienation.

"When she came to visit me after 27 years, I never dreamed how changed she'd be," Meaker says. "She was so reclusive and angry. I had to deal with her anti-Semitism, and of course she was anti-black--she was anti-everybody."

Highsmith spent the last years of her life alone in an isolated area of Switzerland. She was well-known in Europe as the author of the Tom Ripley novels, and reports abound of her dining alone in restaurants, allowing the snails she kept as pets to crawl on the table while she ate. That doesn't surprise Meaker. Even during the comparatively social time of their affair, Highsmith often seemed to prefer animals to people.

"She just loved little critters," Meaker says. "I think she sort of took the side of animals against the world."

Lehoczky writes regularly for the Chicago Tribune.