Breakfast at Tiffany's

I heard Marilyn Monroe in everything Holly Golightly said. I heard her witticisms. Turned out Truman Capote wrote it using Marilyn’s voice.

Holly, a hooker, her protagonist (apartment neighbor) was an in-the-closet gay man. Holly would climb the fire escape and crawl into his room and snuggle in bed with him as if they were lovers. She never denied she was a hooker – but never hid that she had standards and would expect fifty-dollar tips for washroom attendants.

This novella, as does Grapes and Old Man, demonstrates to me the stage play of life we choose to be… show more.

The story of Holly Golightly is really about freedom and attachment.

Holly doesn’t even name her cat anything but Cat. Charming and delightful and utterly terrified of intimacy in some ways, she’s the most loveable flawed character in history. The narrator is understandably enamoured and bothered by her elusive and mercurial nature, and their rapport and connection are heartwarming.

It’s deeply consoling to return to Capote’s familiar passages and what’s gripping for me is how Holly Golightly is always the same character but my feelings about her continue to change. When I was fourteen I admired her and saw her… show more.

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.