Imposter Syndrome – The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

“Elke, why have you never told us you were a famous Bookstagrammer?” a student asked me last week. He said he’d seen my bookshelf video on Instagram and said he felt really proud that I was his teacher. Ever incapable of responding to a compliment properly, this made me feel quite self-conscious, and I lamely blurted out something resembling I’mnotthatfamousbutthankyouverymuchandyoushouldtakealookatthebookshelf. It’s funny, but while this conversation was going on, I was reminded of Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr Ripley. Want to know why I feel there are certain similarities between Tom Ripley, a psychopathic murderer, and me? Read on!

The Talented Mr Ripley, which you might know from the new Netflix series Ripley, is about Tom Ripley, who is on the run for the law and by chance has the opportunity to go to Italy, in order to find a young man, Richard (Dickie) Greenleaf and send him back home to America. When he arrives there, he soon realises that he likes the glamorous upper-class world of fame and fortune, and decides that he will not return to the life he left behind – in fact, he is willing to kill for it.

To be honest, I am not really a fan of thrillers. I’m not that much into blood and gore and excitement and the focus on plot rather than character development. However, I finished Highsmith’s novel in a couple of days, because I kept wondering how far Tom Ripley would go. Turns out: very, very far. He kills Dickie, and when someone’s on his trail, he murders that man too. He changes his hair, he changes his accent, he changes his mannerisms, and eventually he changes his name as well. In fact, he is so determined to come across as Dickie, that he sometimes even convinces himself he isn’t Tom Ripley anymore. It sounds so unrealistic and grotesque, doesn’t it?

It doesn’t to me. Well, apart from the killing, that is. There must be so many of us who at one point in their life pretended to be someone else, someone cooler, braver, better, or more intelligent, only to make friends, become part of a specific group, or to make money. Tom started his new life by pretending to Dickie’s father that he went to university with him while in fact he didn’t, because he wanted to travel to Europe. Little did he know that this trip meant a clean break from the person he was in America.

To me, The Talented Mr Ripley shows how far some people go in order to get what they want. Obviously, Tom is a fictional character, and I doubt there are many people who would actually go so far as to kill someone. Still, though, status, money and success are alluring, and there are many cases of people who bluffed their way onto the world stage (Elizabeth Holmes, for instance) while they had no credentials whatsoever. I also wonder what Patricia Highsmith would have done social media, had she been alive to write a contemporary sequel to the Ripley novels.

This brings us to the conversation I had with my student. The moment he said that he had no idea that I had a blog and a social media page, I suddenly felt like Tom Ripley. He lived in constant fear of being found out. While hiding that part of me from my students isn’t nearly as evil as killing people, I only at that moment realised that I have two faces, too. When I’m at work, I am simply my students’ teacher, who knows pretty much about the English language, who can be quite strict, and very loud. Some see me as the person they can talk to about their problems or their hobbies. Whichever way they see me, they have no idea who I really am.

I don’t tell them about the lectures I occasionally give. I don’t talk about the blog I have been writing on for over six years. I hardly let any of my students know that I have my very own bookshelf at the local library. I keep my literature obsession a secret to all but a few students who love reading, too. Part of me thinks they simply wouldn’t care about that, or that they would think a book blog only shows how boring teachers are, and me in particular, or they would just think it’s a stupid blog and I can’t write. I think I’m just insecure. So when the Instagram video was posted by the library, it was as though these two worlds finally collided – and I was caught in the act.

Because that’s what it felt like: unlike Tom, I had been unable to keep these two parts of myself separate. Whenever I give a lecture, there’s always someone who asks me what I do in my daily life, and I always tell them I teach English but I would much rather give lectures all the time. Like Tom, I have decided which world I truly belong to that I convinced myself my teaching job wasn’t really part of me.

But unlike Tom, I was found out. Also unlike Tom, this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing: my student said he felt proud of the fact that his teacher was a (somewhatnotreallynotatallactually) famous influencer, and that he immediately looked up my blog and liked it. What if other students would respond in the same way? Would I then become a flesh-and-blood influencer whom all students would turn to if they were in need of a good book recommendation? Would everything change, then?

Maybe I should write about this. It would be a series about a woman who lived in two worlds, one in which she thinks she belongs, and one in which she makes her money. And the novel would focus on why and how she keeps those two worlds hidden – just like Patricia Highsmith does in The Talented Mr Ripley. Maybe I should really write that book.

I’ll call it The Talented Ms Maasbommel – and maybe, just like Tom almost convinced himself he was Dickie by repeating it to himself all the time, maybe I might convince myself that I am just that.

What did you think of The Talented Mr Ripley? Have you seen any of its adaptations? Have you ever pretended to be someone else, and if so, why? Which world would you love to belong to? And what would you be willing to do in order to be part of it? Please let me know in the comments! Also, don’t forget to follow me for more book-related posts!