Book Review: "A Christmas Memory" by Truman Capote

Truman Capote is one of my favourite writers in the entire world and honestly, this is the only book I had never read by him before. I have always made a point of reading everything by my favourite authors but I do not understand how I managed to miss this one. Anyways, this is just what it says it is - it is a Christmas story from Truman Capote's own childhood. I will not be discussing how much of it is true and how much of it might be fiction because really, that is not my concern. Instead, I am looking at how Truman Capote writes about his own life.

As we know, Capote's novels always have some aspect fo autobiography. There have been books written by other people about how Truman Capote mirrors real life in his seemingly fictitious situations and novels. However, again, this is not really my concern. My concern is exactly how well he can write this memory and how he communicates it to the reader. The answer is in classical Truman Capote fashion - it is written as if he is sitting in front of us sipping a glass of whisky on ice and telling us about the story of his favourite Christmas where it was simpler and none of this decadence existed.

From the very first page, there is a closeness to the book. You really do feel like he is speaking directly to you instead of talking at you. He asks you to imagine and consider things, he tells you about a certain situation in theory before actually explaining himself and so, this starts to sound more like natural conversations that Truman Capote would have instead of someone who is trying to make everything overtly philosophical and have some sort of secondary meaning. He simply wants us to understand what Christmas was like when he was not a writer famed for his extravagance.

Another thing this book does is it lets us into Capote's life like we never really have been before. In this book he presents himself as especially vulnerable as he does some of the other characters. This is something I have not had the time to get used to in Capote's novels because he either does not do it at all, or does it through a split second decision or situation. In this book, he is a young child, he is with other people that he feel like he does not have to act extravagant with. There is something deeply refreshing about that in Capote's memories that he writes - there is something deeply human about it that I love.

Let's take a look at a quotation from the book which I found to be an example of this vulnerability shown by Truman Capote:

"First a brief autobiographical prologue. My mother, who was exceptionally, was the most beautiful girl in Alabama. Everyone said so, and it was true; and when she was sixteen, she married a twenty-eight year old businessman who came from a New Orleans family. The marriage lasted a year. My mother was too young to be a mother or a wife; she was also too ambitious - she wanted to go to college and to have a career. So she left her husband; and as for what to do with me, she deposited me in the care of her large Alabama family. Over the years, I seldom saw either of my parents. My father was occupied in New Orleans and my mother after graduation from college, was making a success for herself in New York..."

As we can see, the sheer vulnerability fo Truman Capote comes across in his acceptance that his mother was too young to be both a mother and a wife when she was just about coming out of her teens and still had dreams to fulfill. He makes this analysis and then goes back to state that he had literally as little contact as possible with either of them, bringing it back to himself and almost explaining and reasoning why he is so 'eccentric' to other people. As if he ever required to explain himself.