So I didn’t understand how radical The Price of Salt was, how strange and fabulist it is in parts, how hallucinatory and real. I didn’t know how revelatory a book could be to a life lived trying so hard to be normal.
For Electric Literature, Melissa Moorer delivers a thorough analysis of Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt and its importance as one of the rare instances LGBTQ media without a completely tragic ending. Alongside this, she makes her way through the difficult lineage of queerness in her own family, tallying the everyday cruelties and systemic barriers as she considers the ways these stories might end.