Edith's Diary

Have you ever kept a diary or journal, even briefly? Tell us what you wrote in it and what you very deliberately left out.

Edith's life is full of small domestic rituals. What is one ordinary home ritual that comforts you, and did reading about hers make you notice yours differently?

How did it feel to sit inside Edith's house for 320 pages? Did the setting read as cozy, suffocating, or somehow both at once, and where did that feeling shift for you?

Writing in the diary clearly soothes Edith. Which parts of her private writing felt genuinely comforting to you, and was there a point where the comfort started to ache a little?

This is a book about caretaking, about the endless looking-after of a house and the people in it. Did any of that land close to home for you, and how did you feel toward Edith while you read it?

Highsmith sets this in small-town Pennsylvania in a period of real political noise (Vietnam, Kennedy, the shifting 1960s and 70s). Did that background make the house feel safer or lonelier to you?

Think about the moment you first felt a gap opening between what Edith wrote and what was actually happening. What did you feel in that moment, and did you want to keep reading or look away?

By the time you closed the book, what did you most want for Edith? Try to answer in the form of something you would say to her over a cup of tea, without spelling out how things go for her.