Capote in Kansas
A Ghost Story
by Kim Powers
List Price: $25.00
Pages: 304
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 9780786720330
Publisher: Carroll & Graf
Kim Powers is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir The History of Swimming, which was both a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” Selection as well as a Lambda Literary Award finalist for Best Memoir of the Year. Diane Sawyer called it “a riveting memoir: sensitive, wise and unsparing.” The New York Times Book Review called it “raw and engrossing.” Powers also wrote the just-released novel Capote in Kansas: A Ghost Story, which Entertainment Weekly just reviewed as “welcome,” “offbeat,” and “intriguing.” Because of the accomplishment of the two books, Powers has just been selected as one of the “Out 100” – Out Magazine’s top 100 most influential gays or lesbians in the country.
Powers is currently a Writer/Producer at ABC’s "Primetime Live", and won both Emmy and Peabody Awards for his 9/11 coverage for "Good Morning America". A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, he also wrote the screenplay for the festival-favorite indie film “Finding North,” which plays frequently on the Sundance Channel and is available on DVD. He was also a staff writer for the AMC series “The Lot,” and a producer and development executive for the multi-Emmy winning PBS program “Great Performances.” A native Texan, he currently lives in New York City and Asbury Park, New Jersey.
top of the page
Q: You’re clearly fascinated by the real lives of Truman Capote and Harper Lee, yet this is a work of fiction. Why?
KP: I didn’t want to approach their story as biography, or narrative nonfiction. I wanted to set my imagination to the task of bringing those two main characters alive --- and get into their heads in the way a standard biography couldn’t. Creating the device of having the various dead Clutters come back to “haunt” Capote and Lee gave me a means to get into their heads in the imaginative way I wanted to. Ditto with the letters I have Lee writing to her dead brother. I think it’s another way to get into her mind, into the writer’s process, into some of the reasons I think she didn’t write again, into the grief I think has guided her life --- this is only my conjecture. I’ve deliberately written things that didn’t happen: Capote didn’t die the way I have him dying, Lee didn’t attend his infamous Black and White Ball or go bar-hopping with him the way I have her doing. I defied the facts to make character points, not re-write history.
Q: The recent films about Capote and Lee acquainted another generation with the legends and were huge hits. What did you discover about Capote and Lee that you don’t think the movies got --- or got right?
KP: This could be completely personal, but in reading and researching as much as I did about the two of them, I think there’s a pervasive sadness to them that few others have touched on. I think Capote was wounded in his childhood by his mother’s betrayal, and probably never recovered from that. I think that propelled his needy narcissism for the rest of his life --- and in fact turned him into a monster in the eyes of most people. I’m not sure he was. I just love the little details in the lives of both of them and I’ve tried to bring them to the surface: going to see Christine Jorgensen sing just after Capote’s mother died; Capote enlisting his maid to pour sugar in a lover’s gas tank, to get back at him; his obsession with snakes and kites; the party he was trying to pull off, after the Black and White Ball; the agonizing struggle Lee had in writing Mockingbird.
How close is the book to the facts of what we know of Capote and Lee’s lives?
I began the book with the two key points fans probably already knew: that they grew up as children next door to each other, and that she was his assistant as he researched and wrote In Cold Blood in Kansas. Other than that, the rest of the story has been untold --- and was ripe to be filled in --- since neither Capote nor Lee have ever sufficiently done that. The details about how Lee came to write Mockingbird are pretty accurate: how two good friends of hers gave her the money to just write for a year; how many drafts of the book she had to go through; how she lived with her sister Alice, a lawyer, for most of that year in Monroeville. She did keep in touch with FBI agent Alvin Dewey and his wife, long after the Kansas years. All those things are in Capote in Kansas, as is the little bit I could find out about the real person who inspired Boo Radley, and how he tried to “crash” Capote’s Halloween party. The rest of the details of “Boo’s” life --- how it would come back into play at the end of the book --- are entirely my own creation.
Q: Your previous book, The History of Swimming, was a memoir. Capote in Kansas is a novel. Was the experience of writing them similar?
KP: I started Capote in Kansas as I was waiting for The History of Swimming to hit bookstore shelves --- something my work ethic of always needing a new project pushed me to do. The story took shape as I wrote; it wasn’t formulated as I started digging in. But I found, surprisingly, that the book became extremely personal and intimate to me, just like my memoir did --- especially in writing about Harper’s struggles with writing, what it’s like to face a blank page, how her grief over the death of her brother never left her, and how she finally decided it was time to leave the graveyard, as it were, to rejoin the living. Those are all things I was personally dealing with, too --- as well as thinking a lot about getting older, and what any of us have to leave behind as a legacy. I couldn’t jump right back into the sad story of my brothers’ deaths after Swimming, but without realizing it, I tapped into these things in a gentler way while writing Capote. I also think I was exploring the relationship my twin brother Tim and I had, to some degree --- best friends as children, feuding as adults. It was the same with Capote and Lee. Tim was the same as Lee, writing wonderful long letters (almost short stories in and of themselves) to friends, but never quite able to “pull it together” to publish again.
Q: There was a recent auction of Truman Capote memorabilia. If you could have purchased any one thing from it, what would it have been?
KP: A number of his “snake box” collages were auctioned. I have photos of them, but I’d love to have one --- to put my fingers where Capote’s once were, gunked up with glue.
Q: What do you think Lee and Capote would think of this book?
KP: I think Capote might get a hoot out of it. He bent the truth so much in his “non-fiction” writing that I don’t think he would mind that I did it with him in this novel. As for Lee, I don’t think she’d like it. I think it brings her into the public eye in a way she has tried to avoid. I didn’t write anything in the book to hurt her or to expose her, but to chase an obsession I’ve had with her, and Mockingbird, since I was a child. Who is the enigma who wrote it? Did she in fact write it all? I wanted to try and answer those things for myself --- for everyone.
© Copyright 2010 by Kim Powers. Reprinted with permission by Carroll & Graf. All rights reserved.
• Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.
top of the page
