Breakfast at Tiffany's

Her business card simply says, Holly Golightly, Traveling. With darker undertones than the classic fifty-year-old film, this very short novel is a portrait of a nineteen-year-old woman who runs away from her husband in Texas, establishes herself as a socialite in New York City, then runs away some more. Holly seems all fun and bubbles—witty, resourceful, resilient, and flirtatious, but her insides are haunted by trauma. She describes her past with an “almost voluptuous account of swimming and summer, Christmas trees, pretty cousins and parties...” in a way the narrator concludes is certainly not the background of a child… show more.

The iconic 1961 film, starring Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard, diverges from Truman Capote’s 1958 novella in many of its particulars. But in both versions, Holly Golightly’s chosen companion is a nameless stray cat—simply called Cat—who follows her home one day and ends up carrying an awful lot of symbolic freight for such a small critter: freedom, isolation, rootlessness, and big-picture questions as to whether anyone can truly be beyond the basic need to love and be loved. To me, however, Cat is first and foremost a cat—one of the very great cats in one of the post-war era’s very… show more.