An intriguing book about the life of an iconic figure I knew very little about. The writing is brilliant and the fascinating story is definitely a hook. Not quite my genre but worth reading.

In brief ★★★

Another one down on the Women's Prize longlist. Swan Song unravels the social dramas of New York's elite as their confidante, Truman Capote, betrays their most intimate secrets in print. I learned so much about Capote and New York society, and mostly found it an enjoyable read. Readers should note triggers for suicide and drug and alcohol abuse.

Swan Song starts with Capote almost losing a manuscript, and steadily unravels his childhood, literary ascent and then, most interestingly, his platonic relationships with each of the dazzling society women in his circle. We know from the beginning it's all going to end badly - the almost-lost manuscript barely fictionalising the women's darkest secrets - but the interesting part is in the way Greenberg-Jephcott makes this a tragedy, revealing the degrees of intimacy that continually deepen his betrayal. She draws us into the women's world, to help us understand.

Betrayal isn't the only theme, though. Love, motherhood and the idea of genius and what it entails (both the liberties and responsibilities) feature throughout, as do questions of fidelity.

Greenburg-Jephcott writes the novel from the women's perspective as a Greek chorus - a literary device that's effective in its ability to shift amorphously and accumulate details. An insider omniscience, if you will. Their disdain for Capote, sharpened by their prior devotion to him, is present in every aspect of the telling - in the way they call him 'the boy', in the way they trivialise his grief relative to the harm he's inflicted on them, and in the way they blur his tale as subservient to their own.

We learn so much about each of these women - their lives are meticulously researched and vividly imagined. But, even still, each also feels just out of reach, the narrative shifting to keep moving forward - just as we get to know one, our attention is redirected to another, reminding us that they're actually each part of a whole.

I do think the tale could have been more powerful in a slightly shorter format. At times the level of detail for each woman's experience or memory goes too far, the significant amount of research showing through. On the other hand, it is an immersive read you can easily sink into, and not want to surface from until you've witnessed the entire saga.

Recommended if you liked: The Mothers

I received a copy of Swan Song from Random House UK via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Fictionalised account of Truman Capote's life, this literary novel focuses on the women who were his friends during the latter part of his life, and how he betrayed them. Circles around and around the story in a very Capote type way.

Unfortunately this was a DNF for me - it assumes a knowledge of, and interest in, Truman Capote which I simply don't have.

I read this book (and persisted with it when I might otherwise long since have abandoned it) due to its longlisting for the 2019 Women’s Prize.

The book is a fictionalised biography of Truman Capote - for who I think my knowledge is limited to knowing the famous poster of a film for which it turns out Capote wrote the originating novella (Breakfast In Tiffany’s).

However ignorance of a book’s real life subject, when such subject is from the last Century or so, is, in the days of Google, Wikipedia and YouTube, not a barrier to literary enjoyment. My even greater ignorance of for example Pauline Boty, Tacita Dean, Lord Kitchener, Lucia Joyce and Louise Bourgeois hardly prevented my love for Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet or appreciation for this year’s Republic of Consciousness longlist.

As well as Capote the real focus of this book (and sometime first party plural narrators) are his Swans: an inner circle of six privileged, glamorous women for whom he served as: firstly one of their trophies, adding literary genius to their collections of art, jewellery and famous friends; as an empathetic and alway flattering confidant to whom they confided both their juiciest gossip and their innermost secrets.

And it is this later point that lead to the incident which is the central focus of the book a set out here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truman_Capote ,the publication in Esquire of “La Côte Basque 1965", the beginning of the novel “Answered Prayers”, an undertaking which is seen by Capote in this novel as doing for 1960-1970s American society what Proust did for earlier 20th Century France: but by the swans as a gross betrayal: their ire perhaps being greater due to their sudden horror at their own naivety in trusting a writer who invented the genre of nonfiction novel.

There is lots to admire in this heavily researched novel.

From what I can see on You Tube it captures well The flamboyance of the celebrity attracting Capote.

It also cleverly acts on a metafictional level as a compilation of Capote’s different literary output. The narrative form matching his early short story focus and the content a mix of his novels: the early-year autobiographical aspects of “Other Voices, Other Rooms”; the socialite world of “Breakfast In Tiffany’s”; the nonfiction novel aspects of “In Cold Blood”, as well as, of course, the content and style of “Answered Prayers”.

It eschews a linear, conventional third party narrative or a single voice for a mix of free indirect third party and collective first party voices which moves back and forth in time - over Capote’s childhood, his career, his relations with the swans (who at different times take the free indirect lead, or collectively the first person narration), the events of the Esquire article and its aftermath.

And at times this leads to clever foreshadowings and juxtapositions.

We see the young Truman holding a party at school and managing, despite his relative unpopularity, to make everyone anxious for an invite - acting as a foreshadowing of the famous party-of-the-century Black and White Ball (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_and_White_Ball).

On another occasion we are told Babe, one of the swans, as a consummate hostess, hand selects books for each of her guests bedrooms. And this is juxtaposed with a Capote telling a story of his past (an early win In a writing competition where his story was pulled due to its indiscretions and as a result he lost his animal prize) but carefully selecting different versions tailored to appeal to each of his swans.

The collective voice of the swans also worked for me, particularly towards the book’s close as the swans pull together to exclude Capote and their voice starts to appear in his haunted sub-conscious.

But another reason for my preference for the collective voice was my inability to distinguish the swans, and my unwillingness to spend time or mental effort trying to identify and keep track of them.

And by extension I had next to no interest in following the names or researching the lives of those with which they interact - and the occasional names that I did recognise (for example Kennedy, Angelli, Sinatra etc) held no interest for me.

The lack of appeal matches how I feel about modern day celebrity gossip magazines - this heavily researched novel reads like a retrospective series of Hello issues.

And this is the fundamental issue that I had with the book - the milieu that it describes.

This is a world of celebrity, of rich and privileged people who live superficial, meaningless, empty and sad lives. And it is not a world that I enjoyed spending any time in.

This is really good. While it is most definitely a bit of a Rich People Problems type of situation, there is proper scandal, betrayal and heartbreak on all sides here. There are a lot of novels that talk about the unhappiness of rich and privileged people, and although they can sometimes be my favourite books to read, when it doesn’t work it’s hard to muster any sympathy. But that’s not the case here at all – the women who Truman exposes have all their unhappiness exposed to the world – all the things that they have managed to ignore or put up with to keep their status are suddenly out there in print and although Joe Public might not know who the stories are about at first, the veil disguising their identities is very thin and people work it out – fast. I still can’t make up my mind if Truman knew that what he was about to do was going to explode his life but did it because he was terrified about failing to deliver a follow up to In Cold Blood, or if he thought that the women wouldn’t mind and couldn’t believe that they would be prepared to turn their backs on him. My main quibble was around the last quarter – which I didn’t think worked quite as well as the earlier part had done, mostly because after the swans have broken with him, using them as a narrative device didn’t work quite as well for me.

Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott's debut novel is an ambitious exploration of Truman Capote's life, giving voice to his 'Swans' through a first person collective narrative voice.

Full of gossip and scandal, this novel is an intriguing delve into New York high society life through the 1960s and 70s. Greenberg-Jephcott's writing is wonderfully descriptive and immersive, she embellishes every detail. Tt is a rich world which it is easy to get lost in; the reader drifts through this novel, which has an atmosphere of heady intoxication. The amount of research which must have gone into such a book is phenomenal and the details of Truman's life trigger many an internet rabbit-hole, and is endlessly fascinating. Moreover, the premise of telling the story of these women who were betrayed by a man close to them is really engaging, and it is great to see the Greenberg-Jephcott challenge the idea that they were simply flat 'society' women. She develops a wonderful cast of characters, and while at first it may be confusing to a reader who doesn't know their real life counterparts, they become iconic, representative of a bygone era.

However, all of the research and detail that has gone into the novel makes it very long, and while a long novel isn't inherently a negative, a good book shouldn't feel lengthy. This book could benefit from some closer editing to make it more concise. The dreamlike narrative makes it difficult to piece together a coherent timeline as the novel drifts from one vignette to the next. Had the novel picked up a little more pace, the gossip and intrigue would have carried the reader's interest much more effectively.

Swan Song is a interesting and clever book, which I certainly enjoyed reading, and I would be keen to see what Greenberg-Jephcott does in the future.

Nominated for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2019
This novel is based on a fascinating real-life story, but I was bored out of my mind reading it: After spending years with the rich and the famous, writer Truman Capote published a text called "La Côte Basque 1965" in an issue of Esquire magazine in 1975, which was intended to be part of his new novel "Answered Prayers" (the unfinished book was then published posthumously in 1986). In it, Capote spills the secrets of some of his high society friends, their thinly veiled identities easy to decipher for contemporary readers. As a consequence, Capote lost many of his closest female friends, socialites who felt like he sold them out for personal gain, while he argued that, well, he's a writer, so he writes.

This could make for a drama of epic proportions, and Greenberg-Jephcott does a decent job trying to demonstrate how a neglected boy from Alabama grows up to become a famous writer who seeks validation in the highest circles, and then goes too far by exposing women who are themselves caught in a web of strict societal norms. But just like the lifestyle shown in the book, everything is over-the-top and completely empty at the same time: The book is too chatty and too long, while there is also not enough content (insert torturous vignettes about so-and-so who wore the wrong clothes on so-and-so's yacht, and people drinking cocktails while talking about nothing *yawn*), the language is too manufactured, but does not convey much, and the people are often simply caricatures.

The narrative idea was apparently to write a revenge tale, where the socialites (the "swans") tell their side of the story, and the author introduces a "we"-narration with shifting points of view, which doesn't always work, but is quite interesting. But make no mistake, this is not about empowerment or feminism: The swans sound like absolutely terrible, shallow people who used to hang out with Capote because he was kind of exotic and amusing. They are not glamorous, they are completely void. Capote is turned into a caricature, regularly referred to as "the boy" when he is already a grown-up man (you could argue it's to maintain some connection to the narrative thread about his childhood, but it's derogatory), he is the "elfin" with the "girlish voice", he is a "twisted little cherub", he says sentences like "Weeeelllll, you seeeeeee, Gore was drunk as a skunk, quelle surprise" - I'm sorry, but women who talk about a homosexual man like that are not "beautiful, wealthy, vulnerable women" (the blurb), they are mainly idiots. Granted, Capote himself was known for his vicious comments and he betrayed their trust, but the whole set-up of the story suffers from the fact that everyone is just terrible, and I don't feel like this was an intentional narrative decision.

I can't generally judge how well-researched the book is (and maybe all of those interconnected stories about all the socialites Capote disappointed and their pretty uninteresting trials and tribulations are true) but there is one lengthy part that talks about the five stages of grief as described by Swiss-born psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, and it's easy to find the correct German terminology via Google, Wikipedia, you name it. If an author decides to insert the German terms of a scientific model (and the Kübler-Ross-model was developed in the US and in English, so the German version serves no purpose whatsoever in the context of this book), it's embarassing if some of the terms she employs are not only wrong, but completely absurd: No, the German word for "depression" is certainly not "Gedrückt". *sigh* I think I'm getting eine "Depression" (!!!).

So all in all, I was promised the glamour and the excitement of the haute volée, but instead, it was ennui and tristesse royale. I think the author had some interesting ideas to heighten the complexity of this tale, but unfortunately, the book fails to deliver: This is chick lit - and I believe that it is much more amusing for people who are interested in the escapdes of the haute volée than it was for me.

I was initially interested in reading this book, however my tastes have shifted and I do not think I will be able to get to it now. Many thanks to the publisher for sending me a digital copy!

I don't even know where to start with how much I loved this book! The scandals of New York high society and the impish Capote at the heart of it all. Anyone who has even a mild interest in the golden days of Hollywood, Capote, the Kennedys or the New York of the 50s and 60s has to read this book. It's long but it's completely delectable. It took me forever to read because I wanted to keep going back over parts and re-reading them. I could not recommend it enough, I loved it.

It was a surprise to me that Swan Song didn't receive more attention. It was thoroughly entertaining as well as moving, and you could tell it was meticulously researched. But it also sparked a conversation about the fictionalisation (and mythologising) of historical figures that are not long gone. It's one thing to attempt a nonfiction biography of a figure but quite an act of bravery to attempt a fictionalisation. Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott succeeds in bringing Truman Capote to life in a way that is satisfying and treats him like a fully-fleshed character of her own making (which in a way he is) while also drawing on the larger-than-life image Capote projected.. One of the most effective scenes is where Jephcott basically writes out transcript of the notorious interview. The reader can go on Youtube and watch it and it is so painful.

There are parts where the text was less successful. The dialects and posh slang used by Truman and his swans work well in dialogue but when it entered the narration became a little grating.The narrative experimentation based on the stages of grief thing I found a little lazy as well. It stifled the potential to dig in Capote's grief rather than moulding his reaction to fit a conventional frame. There are also places where Jephcott-Greenberg seems to eschew the wonderful and skilful subtlety she mostly employs to drop things on us like a ton of bricks.

Overall, Swan Song is as satisfyingly detailed as a nonfiction biography. The experience of reading it, where you feel a little thrill as you recognise names and key events, connects the reader to this world of insider/outsiders and "bitchery and butchery"..

Truman Cope, an eccentric, charming individual and the author of books such as ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ and ‘In Cold Blood’ sabotages his circle of rich and infamous but dropping a literary blog. His articles talk about the secrets and lies of the elite, passed on during social gatherings. The author brings facts and fiction together in this story and gives us more on the upbringing of Truman.

“A boy pampered and indulged well into middle age, courtesy of his unquestioned genius.”

Truman was known for his easy-going nature and his ways to finds secrets at all place. Once his articles were published, the reaction from the elite was something worthwhile and fascinating to read. Truman was barred from any social functions and a lot of the people whom Truman exposed made harsh and violent statements.
A book about the lives of people with money and power, the exclusive expose and the reasons leading to such an act by Truman is what the author exploits throughout. I personally, loved the writing. The characters are so diverse and layered, shady and malicious. The New York Elite society has also been described at length and the whole thing comes together beautifully.
Swan Song is a must read for people who love a lot of drama, especially scandals involving the rich. Definitely Recommended.

Another long and beautiful debut of 2018, I really enjoyed Swan Song. If you are a fan of Capote you should read this book as it's an extensive work of research and tells him from his swans' eyes making the whole story more interesting.
Beautiful book inside out.

I LOVED this book. Probably it was one of the best I read in 2018. I'm really sorry I don't see this book all over. It deserves much more attention.
It's a true historical fiction that made me travel to other times, when your position in society was very important and glamour was everything. Those times are gone, but it was so enchanting to read about.
It tells the story of Capote and his Swans. I knew nothing of them, but it made it all the more interesting.
I really don't want to say more. Just buy this book and dive into it if you like historical literary novels. It's ace!
Thanks so much to the publisher and NetGalley for this copy.

In her debut novel, “Swan Song”, Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott reimagines Truman Capote's decline due to the backlash that followed the publication of Capote's infamous short story “La Côte Basque 1965” in the November 1975 issue of Esquire magazine, the first excerpt from his unfinished novel Answered Prayers. Capote's intention was to expose, in what he believed would be his most ambitious work, the scandalous secrets of his Swans: a group of wealthy, stylish, influential New York socialites, including Nancy "Slim" Keith, Babe Paley, Gloria Vanderbilt, Marella Agnelli, and Lee Radziwill, who accepted Capote into their social circle, and, as it later turned out, unwisely trusted him with their private thoughts and, often salacious, secrets.


The book offers an interesting interpretation of what might have motivated Capote to commit such a callous act of betraying his friends and suggests that he wanted to get some sort of revenge on the rich and powerful, who he blamed for the loss of his mother. The reasoning was rather strange, but, in the light of his eccentric personality, I guess that kind of makes sense. The book also suggests that Capote hadn't really thought through the consequences that might follow his actions.


In the end, the book-in-progress actually turned into a swan song for Truman Capote himself: with the publication of this “La Côte Basque 1965”, he had essentially committed social suicide. Suddenly abandoned by the Swans, Capote fell into a downward spiral, fuelled by his destructive relationship with drugs and alcohol, that ultimately lead to his premature death.


The story is mainly told from the point of view of the Swans, who loved Capote and felt betrayed and humiliated by his actions. The narrative shifts between these socialites and forms a vivid portrait of their luxurious, indulgent lifestyles, their shallow, vindictive personalities, and how, later on, each of them dealt with the scandal. It's quite a long novel and the author goes into great detail in describing the relationship dramas among the high-society men and women, so, at times, the novel starts to feel like a literary gossip column, which would have been more fun to read, if I hadn't had to google most of the names that were mentioned in the book. In some parts, this made the reading experience a bit tiresome, however, I suspect that other readers with more previous knowledge about these famous, extremely rich people might find this aspect of the book more enjoyable. It's clear that the author had done a lot of research in the process of writing this story.


What I found most interesting about this novel were the chapters that focused on Capote and gave some insight into his personal history and over-the-top personality. Seeing the way in which his life unravelled after the publication of the excerpts from his planned novel almost reads like a cautionary tale about how a person can climb right to the top of the social ladder, and then, somewhat unwittingly, trigger his own downfall and self-destruction.

I actually listened to the audiobook in the end, which is fantastic, and I recommend highly - so well done, and a rich and immersive experience. I was blown away by everything in this book: the voice and the third-person plural narration of the Swans is most notable. But so many other things. The story: a great artist's self-destruction. The characters, major and minor. The weaving in of so many strands of storyline. The research! The gorgeous prose (just what you'd hope for with this subject). Some most impressive set pieces - the rendering of the Black and White Ball is particularly well done.

Truman Capote was one of those slightly odd figures that gained notoriety in 20th Century America. Openly gay in a world that still considered it to be wrong he was lauded and infamous. And rightly so. Anyone that's read his work knows he was not just a good writer, he was one of the greats despite much of his talent been wasted. This novel tells the story of how he managed to knock himself off his pedestal by using his friends lives to write a salacious novel. Just an excerpt was enough to see him ousted from the elite cliques he had worked so hard to infiltrate. That novel was Answered Prayers, a novel Capote described as been his posthumous novel, saying "either I'm going to kill it, or it's going to kill me". History tells us now how prophetic that comment was.

On the plus side of this novel it is compelling, beautifully written in a very Capote like fashion and breathtakingly heart breaking in places. On the negative it's so frenetic I found myself confused about who I was reading about and where we were in the story. I'll blame some of that on reading during a flu bout but I don't think it was entirely down to the copious amounts of Night Nurse been sank. There's a tendency I think of the author expecting the reader to know who some of the characters were that could of done with a little more description. But when all is said this is a moving story, that somehow makes Capote a sympathetic character without brushing over any of his faults. And if nothing else it's sent me back to my old bookcases to return to Capote again.

Swan Song is a novel about the swans: a bevy of rich glamorous socialites that gathered around author Truman Capote in his New York heyday. Capote flattered them, gossipped with them and became privy to their deepest secrets. When he published the early chapters of his unfinished novel Answered Prayers Capote proceeded to lay bare these secrets and did very little to obscure the inspiration for his characters. The backlash from his swans was instant and terrible.

The novel is, ironically, a roman a clef about an author who thought he was writing an epic roman a clef, which he thought justified his actions. His social milieu saw it very differently and ostracised him almost completely, although some did acknowledge that sharing your secrets with a writer would inevitably lead to him publishing them.

Each of Capote's swans is given a focus in the novel and her story told. Most of these were born to high society but some, including Capote, had a more staid background and had to lift themselves out of poverty. Most had lives that were blighted by sadness and misfortune which Capote played on for his material; little wonder they were angry. There are some nice touches in which an anecdote gets retold several times with differing detail, underlining the Chinese whispers nature of the gossip that lies at the centre of this drama.

As far as I could tell, the novel is pretty close to the truth and the author does make you feel sympathetic towards all of her main characters. There is a sadness to this story and the tragedy of a man of great promise and achievement who brought himself undone.

Writing a novel in the first person plural is a tricky act to pull off. Jeffrey Eugenides is a wonderful writer but The Virgin Suicides could feel unnecessarily hobbled by the fact of its being told by the anonymous boys from across the street. The collective narrators are undifferentiated, and unnamed.
Swan Song, which won the Bridport Prize in 2015, operates more as an Olympian relay of Greek choristers, the baton being passed between the six women – the “swans” of the title - who, collectively, counted Truman Capote as their gay best friend. Until, that is, he turned their lives into art in Answered Prayers, a work intended to be the US equivalent of À la recherche du temps perdu, and which marked the beginning of his slow, social suicide.
The swans, CZ Guest, Babe Paley, Slim Keith, Marella Agnelli, Gloria Guinness and Lee Radziwill, are of course, rich, beautiful and fascinating. Each is given a generous amount of space in the novel, her backstory filled out, occasionally in an annoyingly quirky fashion – Gloria Guinness’ being told in ballad form, for example.
A cursory referral to Wikipedia shows that Greenberg-Jephcott has done her research – ten years of it, apparently. Capote’s earliest years, abandoned in fleapit hotel rooms while his mother goes out to meet men, to be pacified eventually with swigs of warm milk mixed with “Mama Juice”, the amber liquid she keeps by her bedside, are movingly evoked, so that you get a powerful sense of how the awkward, undersized, clever boy transmogrifies into a man of letters. It’s hard to believe now that the image of a gay man gazing meaningfully at a camera could cause an uproar, but in 1947, courtesy of the Harold Halma photograph on the back of Other Voices, Other Rooms, it did. Capote becomes so celebrated he is a meme. “There’s the winner of the Truman Capote Lookalike Contest”, remarks Alvy Singer in Annie Hall - the figure striding through Central Park in the shot is Capote himself.
The narrative of Swan Song swoops around the years – before, during and after Capote’s zenith – including the celebrated Black & White Ball, described so sumptuously that you wish fervently that you had been there, however much communion you feel with the anti-Vietnam protestor who inveigles her way in.
The Swans are collectively horrified to a greater or lesser extent after Esquire magazine publishes an extract from Answered Prayers in 1975. Their dirty linen has been publically washed (literally in the case of Babe Paley’s philandering husband, up all night scrubbing the sheets on which his lover has menstruated copiously). They drop Truman, his fall from grace is permanent, and he slides into alcohol and pill addictions, eventually dying in Joanne Carson’s home aged 59. The image this novel evokes of him in the wilderness years, sipping his favourite “orange drink,” – a fancy version of a screwdriver – pills lined up and over his rotund belly, is hilarious and tragic.
This is a fascinating book, poignant and beautifully evoked. I look forward to more from this author.
Answered Prayers, never finished, was published posthumously.

This novel transports the reader to an era of glamour, society and fame of a bygone era. You really got to know Capote and his "Swans", even though I had read nothing about some of the Swans before this. How Capote betrayed the trust of those he loved thinking it wouldn't bother them makes you think he was callous and calculating, but in the end the person that these revelations hurt the most was himself.
This is the best book I have read so far in 2018