Capote's Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era

Truman Capote (1924-1984) was an American author best known for his novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s and his true-crime book In Cold Blood. In Capote’s Women, Leamer introduces Truman as a storyteller at heart, who not only wrote novels, short stories, plays, and screenplays, but also “[mesmerized] audiences with his outrageous tales” in person and on television (259). Although Truman obviously enjoyed the material benefits of his friendships with the women he called swans, Leamer suggests that Truman also believed that “each woman had an extraordinary story to tell, and Truman was the only one who could tell them” (3). These passages suggest that Truman was a storyteller at heart, and that his goal for Answered Prayers was to tell stories.

Ultimately, however, Truman was “an inveterate gossip” (84) and his tendency to spread stories about his friends backfired. Slim Keith openly claimed that Truman “made things up and much of what he said was not true” (84), dismissing him as a “pathetic, untrustworthy little gossip who spent his days doing little but passing on the most savage of tales” (87). Leamer suggests that Truman’s tendency to gossip is related to his fear of abandonment. After being abandoned by his parents, Truman was hell-bent […] not to be rejected again—he was going to do the rejecting” (22).