From a Wall Street Journal story by James Runcie headlined “Five Best: Love Stories”:

The Price of Salt
By Patricia Highsmith (1952)

1. In 1948, when she was 27 years old, Patricia Highsmith took a job as a salesgirl in the toy section of a Manhattan department store. One morning, “a blondish woman in a fur coat” came in to buy a doll for her daughter. After the transaction, Highsmith felt “odd and swimmy in the head, near to fainting, at the same time uplifted.” That night, she wrote an eight-page outline of her only love story, a novel that captures all the giddiness of that initial bouleversement.