#mentalfloss

One of my all-time favourite books is The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith.

This is a great piece that explores the similarities between Highsmith and her most memorable character, the charming sociopath Tom Ripley.

Some highlights:

Throughout her life, she was plagued by the sense that she didn’t belong, that she deserved a higher social class or standing, and that she’d been orphaned (her mother lived to be 95, but she told a young Patricia that she’d tried to abort her by drinking turpentine). “I learned to live with a grievous and murderous hatred very early on,” she once said.

Damn.

…at the age of 27, upon beginning psychoanalysis to “cure” her homosexuality, she began seducing  the women in her group therapy sessions.

PATRICIA

In her books, she killed off women with her girlfriends’ names (and dogs with their dogs’ names).

That's dark.

When Highsmith’s American agent told her that the reason her paperbacks didn’t sell well in the U.S. was that there was no one likable in them, her retort was, “Perhaps it is because I don’t like anyone.”