Never trust a novelist. They are all traitors, viewing life as a first draft of art and appraising family, friends and lovers as models for their characters. Truman Capote is said to have invented the nonfiction novel in his true crime story In Cold Blood, but every novelist fictionalises facts and shamelessly fibs about doing so. Capote was slicker than most when practising his deceptive trade: he always had a pair of dark glasses handy because they made lying easier, and he even teasingly established what he called “the Holly Golightly Sweepstakes”, taking bets on the original identity of the flighty, homegrown geisha in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
The serially adulterous, insatiably mercenary Manhattan socialites who lunched with Capote at East Side restaurants such as La Côte Basque were outraged when he betrayed their secrets in Answered Prayers, his doomed attempt to equal Proust’s chronicle of upper-class manners.
