This Summer 2025, I have assigned a novel with my classes I recently plucked off my shelf here in Mexicali. It's called Paradise Travel, and it is written by Jorge Franco. I'm not giving any spoiler alerts, but it focuses upon the American Dream - two teen-age lovers, Marlon and Reina from Medellín, Colombia, who successfully make the long, ardous journey to New York City but learn tough, life-changing lessons along the way. I like this novel, for the CHANGE in characters that happens right before our eyes. Both Marlon and Reina become Hard and Knowing. They are entirely different people at the end of the novel. Did their journey to the U.S. change the way they saw each other? How did their struggle to fit in, to find their place, to define their identities...Affect Their Love?
My students appear to engage with the novel, but I didn’t think about this until only recently – Few, if any, of my students will know much about setting of the novel, The Big Apple, New York City. To them, New York City must seem like a distant planet. Damn, I haven’t been to New York City in like 40 years. I don’t know much more then they do. But, that’s why I’ve developed a group project to complement our reading. I call it Jay’s NYC Scrapbook. For our Summer FINAL EXAM Project, I’ve asked by student to collaborate in groups to research a New York PERSON, PLACE, THING, HISTORICAL EVENT, CULTURAL PHENEMONON, MUSICAL OR SPORTS MOMENT, FASHION STATEMENT, MOVIE SCENE, SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY... Their final grade will correspond to the quality of their Final Exam Group Presntation and Display Boards.
Why? Like what course standard does knowledge of New York City meet? I don’t know, and I didn’t look. I’ve created this project to boost student reading pleasure. I myself have a goal to read FIFTY books this year. It’s July, and I’m right on pace. Some of the books I have chosen are now my favorites of all time. Some, not so much. For each book I read, I try my best to look beyond the pages. The more I know about the setting, the deeper I dive into my reading. I’ve told that to my students. They are already searching articles about the New York Skyline, Subway System, Homeless Situation, Twin Towers Tragedy, FRANK SINATRA.... (See above!)
Why can’t the instructor, ME, have any fun? While my students canvas our campus databases for NYC ideas to include in their Final Exam presentation, I read a NYC novel called The Price of Salt. I’m an indiscriminate reader. I’ll read anything. I read everything. I made a good choice this time, for The Price of Salt may be one of the best/surprising/unique novels I have ever read. This one happens to be about a lesbian love affair based on author Patricia’s Highsmith real-life obsession with a customer that came into her place of work, Bloomingdales of New York, to buy a doll for her daughter. That was the only time they met, but it wasn’t the last time Patricia would see her customer. With a copy of the receipt in hand, young Patricia twice hopped a train to New Jersey to stalk this woman’s house. I’m not sure if she wanted to fuck her or kill her. Patricia would be inspired to turn her obsession into million-copy paperback romantic thriller: The Price of Salt ( later renamed “Carol” for the movie.)
Author Patricia Highsmith has always been a favorite of mine. Since the beginning of the pandemic, I’ve been re-connecting with the books on my shelves here in Mexicali. In fact, I probably have an entire shelf devoted to “The Talented Miss Highsmith.” Jaja. I keep her short-story collections and biographies right next to the novels. I have heard others describe her writing as dull and monotonous, but I find her characters dark and complicated. Things move slowly, I agree, but I have come to expect something very unsettling awaits me just a few pages ahead. It’s worth the journey. The reward comes in both truth and suspense.
I'm not writing a book report here. It's more like I'm sharing my reading of Pat's twenty-something years in NYC. I can't say I know anything about lesbian life for a young woman in the 1950s but for in order for Pat to publish The Price of Salt, she had to adopt a pseudonym. Her publishers were GOOD with her writing about murderers and psychopaths, but they didn't want anything to do with lesbians. But that didn't stop her or even slow her down. She took this novel to another publisher. The name Claire Morgan appears on the cover in place of the author's name.
The edition of the novel I have on my shelf is the revised edition with Pat's name FRONT and CENTER. I see the novel was re-published in 1984. How our sense of sexual identity had changed in thirty years. In 1952, at the time Pat first laid eyes on the woman who she believed to be the Love of Her Life, homosexuality was outlawed in New York City. This fact plays a major role in the plot of her novel. The young protagonist, Therese, seems to be involved in a relationship with a boyfriend that is going nowhere. How could it? She is only now realizing her lesbian self. The object of her Love, Carol Aird, who is much older and wiser, is married with a child. Here is the conflict of hte novel: When Carols's husband realizes his own wife is a lesbian, he threatens to divorce her and take full custody of the child on "moriality" grounds. Carol's lawyer convinces her that will happen. Carol has to choose between Terese and her own child. That's "The Price of Salt."
I don't plan to introduce any homoerotic literature in my classes, but reading The Price of Salt has inspired me to research it's setting. Therese and Carol spend a considerable amount of time entering and exiting NYC restaurants. As a mater of course, I began searching New York City FOOD on the internet. I have encouraged my students to pursue their own NYC interests in groups with the goal making an oral presentation on Final Exam Day.
- This means they have to put their heads together - Each group member needs to choose a specific idea to contribute to a group outline.
- I suggested they lead with an ACADEMIC SKILL they have learned this semester. Like: QUOTE SANDWICH. DEFINITION. SUMMARY. CHARACTER ANALYSIS. ANECDOTE
- You can see my instructor sample below - I began with THREE BOXES - I will assign THREE MORE next week.

Upon my completion of the novel, I came across Pat's afterword. I had never seen or read this before. She writes, "Prior to this book, homosexuals male and female in American novels had had to pay for their deviation by cutting their wrists, drowning themselves in a swimming pool, or by switching to heterosexuality (so it was stated), or by collapsing—alone and miserable and shunned—into a depression equal to hell." To tell you the truth, I looked to see something similar with the turn of each page. As a student and fan of Patricia Highsmith, I've learned to expect the worst. But, thank you Patricia H, you don't follow any code. You make your own. None of the aforementioned tropes found their way into this novel The surprising ending to The Price of Salt made for both a rewarding and illuminating reading experience.
In reading a few of Pat's biograpies, I recently discovered the author was a compulsive notetaker. From the time she was a teenager, she kept both journals and diaries. In her journals, she would capture details from her everyday life. Details of restaurant menus. Snips of conversations with lovers. Possible names of future characters. In her diaries, she would explore the depths of her soul. The writing from both these sources, she would eventually transfer directly to her novels. She is known to have amassed and kept 8,000 pages of notes. I have read a few of Pat’s diary entries reprinted a few years ago in the New Yorker. Among them, Pat records the day she met a handsome blonde woman dressed in a mink coat who came into her place of work when she was a college English major, working part-time in the toy department at Bloomingdales. This was December 8, 1948: Pat jotted down details about the encounter in her diary. Clearly the woman caught more than her attention. It must have been LOVE at first sight: “How we looked at each other—this intelligent-looking woman! I want to send her a Christmas card, and am planning what I’ll write on it.” Her diary entries reflect a clear obsession with this woman. Pat described how the woman "seemed to give off light.... I felt odd and swimmy the head, near to fainting, at at the same time uplifted as if I had a vision."
I imagine she wrote these notes in her "cahier" on her train ride back to NYC. Pat went directly back to her apartment to write up a plot outline for the novel. Her biographers say she was absolutely feverish. Like she was on FIRE. She couldn't stop writing. After she completed what she set out to do, she found out that she had contracted the chicken pox. (She was nineteen-years old.) By the time Pat died in 1995 at age 74, she had kept 8000 pages of notes at her disposal and written 22 novels. Writing for her was a compulsion. She once said, “I’m miserable when I can’t write.”
Wouldn’t’ that be great if I could make my students feet that way?