Editing Patricia Highsmith (section)

=== Health ===
Highsmith had [[anorexia]] as a teenager and episodes of [[Mood disorder|depression]] throughout her life.<ref name="Wilson2003" />{{Rp|page=|pages=58, 116}} Despite literary success, she wrote in her diary of January 1970: "[I] am now cynical, fairly rich ... lonely, depressed, and totally pessimistic."<ref name="Schenkar2009" />{{Rp|page=462}} She was an alcoholic who by her middle age drank from breakfast until she went to bed at night. She smoked 40 Gauloises cigarettes a day and rarely ate fruit and vegetables. In 1973 her doctor advised her that if she did not change her lifestyle she might not live past 55.<ref name="Bradford2021" />{{Rp|pages=x, 197–198}}

Highsmith underwent surgery in May 1980 for blockages in two arteries of her right leg, and in April 1986 she had successful surgery for lung cancer (of a type not related to smoking). In January 1992 she had a procedure to widen her left femoral artery, and in September the following year she had surgery to remove a non-cancerous tumor in her lower intestine. Later in 1993 she was diagnosed with the aplastic anemia and lung cancer that would kill her.<ref name="Wilson2003" />{{Rp|pages=379, 411–414, 446, 454–455}}