Yikes. This quote makes way too much sense.

From The Telegraph (via Bookslut):

Patricia Highsmith's mother tried to abort her by drinking turpentine. Later in life, she said to her daughter: "It's funny you like the smell of turpentine, Pat."

Anyway.  If you haven't read her and this sounds at all attractive...:

Think of the mild terror you experience when the crank at the next table, having subjected you to his monologues, somehow prizes your phone number out of you; or at the loud, drunken bore on a plane.

...

She created unsympathetic protagonists: the seriously unhinged or the dully melancholic. Her endings are rarely predictable; the action is often a demented loop. Victims turn into stalkers, stalkers turn into victims, murders are botched, the eccentric can be harmless or insane. We are anxious because we have no way of knowing: the world is out of control.

...then get to it.  She's fantastic.