Sadly this left me as cold as Capote’s betrayal. 3/5 stars.
Thank you to Random House UK and NetGalley for giving me an e-copy of this book.
The blurb:
They told him everything.
He told everyone else.
Over countless martini-soaked Manhattan lunches, they shared their deepest secrets and greatest fears. On exclusive yachts sailing the Mediterranean, on private jets streaming towards Jamaica, on Yucatán beaches in secluded bays, they gossiped about sex, power, money, love and fame. They never imagined he would betray them so absolutely.
In the autumn of 1975, after two decades of intimate friendships, Truman Capote detonated a literary grenade, forever rupturing the elite circle he’d worked so hard to infiltrate. Why did he do it, knowing what he stood to lose? Was it to punish them? To make them pay for their manners, money and celebrated names? Or did he simply refuse to believe that they could ever stop loving him? Whatever the motive, one thing remains indisputable: nine years after achieving wild success with In Cold Blood, Capote committed an act of professional and social suicide with his most lethal of weapons . . . Words.
My take:
Swan Song should have been fascinating. I knew Truman Capote rubbed shoulders with the upper crust but I had no idea of the extent of his connections. He was intimate friends with New York royalty, spending years holidaying and enjoying boozy lunches with them. This book gives an insiders’ view of the lives of the very rich members of US and, to a lesser extent, European society in the 60s and 70s, and then details the fall-out when Truman screwed them over by publishing their most shocking secrets as thinly-veiled fiction.
