There is one incident in this book to which I totally related. Towards the end of his famous 'black and white' ball, Capote comes across a plain young woman in a street black dress looking on as he sees it, longingly. Thinking she wants to join in, he invites her in whereupon she throws a glass of champagne at him and berates him for the waste of money. This novel left me with a similar feeling. I felt nauseated reading about so much wealth and so many vacuous lives. 

Taking an incident from Capote's life, that is when he publishes a chapter from his novel in the magazine Esquire, there is something to admire in the writing. The author does capture Capote's voice and it appears to be very well researched. The Esquire chapter throws a bomb into his social life as he has written about the lives of his 'swans' a group of socialites who hang around him, telling him secrets that they are dismayed to read about in the magazine. Almost to a woman, they shun him and this leads him into an alcoholic and drug addled decline. he can't believe he's being blacklisted by them, after all he's a writer but they turn on him viciously. There seems to be little to admire in either the 'swans' or in the writer. 

There are also things that irritate greatly in the writing. Endless descriptions of Capote's looks:. his grotesque head, his pygmy limbs, his tow headed locks, his girlish voice. Scenes from the time are revisited several times and the structure could definitely be tightened up. 

Overall, I did not like this book at all. To misquote the emperor in the film/play Amadeus 'there are simply too many words.' Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

A story of betrayal and glamour. Even if you don’t know Truman Capote you will enjoy this tale of old school intrigue. 
4/5 on goodreads

Swan Song by Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott
This is the fictionalised account of a book which Truman Capote wrote about the lives of the women for whom he became a confidant over a number of years.  The book when it was published in Esquire magazine caused a furore as it revealed the secrets, gathered over the course of many years, of the powerful and famous women of the time.  Truman Capote had a strange childhood and did not cut a dashing figure but he managed to place himself at the heart of this group of women and become the beneficiary of many damaging secrets.  
Although his revelations were written with pseudonyms it was obvious to everyone who the people were that he was writing about and the fallout was considerable.  The damage which the book wrought was unimaginable and although Truman claimed that they always knew they could end up in one of his stories the suicide could not have been what he intended.  
This is the story of a damaged person wreaking havoc on those who held him dear and he begins on a downward spiral consumed by drink and drugs.
This is a fascinating, well written account of the damaged lives of the privileged and I thank Net Galley and the publishers for the opportunity to read it.

This is the first book I have read by Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott and found her writing exquisite.  It is an unusual read for me, but I must admit to being completely engrossed in the life of Truman Capote who I knew very little about, apart from his books.  The author has spent much time on researching and treated the information with care and consideration.

Swan Song highlights the tragic world in which Truman exists coupled with the luxury of high society.  From a deprived upbringing he surrounds himself with beautiful women.  He calls them his swans with the story going between.  The story goes between his Truman’s perspective and those of the women during different phases of his life.

Gossip and name dropping (Jackie Onassis for one) in abundance, I thoroughly enjoyed the read.  I was spell bound with the elaborate decadence and wasn’t surprised that he turned to drugs and alcohol as he became older but not wiser.

Many thanks to NetGalley, Random House, UK, Windmill Books and Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott for my ARC in return for my honest review.

Great read – highly recommended

A phenomenal exploration of the life of Truman Capote, and his “swans” – the female companions who were his muses and dearly beloved friends.

A troubled individual throughout his life, Truman’s swans anchor him somewhat, but he betrays them cruelly with barely disguised revelations in his writing.

The story moves between perspectives – Truman’s own, and those of individual swans, through various periods in his life.

This is a long book, but don’t be intimidated, it is truly fascinating as well.

Kelleigh Greenberg-Jeffcott’s Swan Song is a masterpiece in characterisation, gossip and glamour from a bygone era. Swan Song captures the allure and extravagance of high society, offering an insight into the frenetic and tragic world of Truman Capote and the inner circle he inhabits. From privileged confidante of the elite to story teller extraordinaire, Capote’s increasing dependence on drugs and alcohol in his unending search for love and adoration contributes to his declining physical and mental health and subsequent tragic fall from grace and favour.

This is a fascinating and extremely engrossing story about the life of Truman Capote, author of in Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany's.  Full of glamour and intrigue this is a wonderful read for lazy summer days, preferably with a cocktail or three to hand.

The Autobiography of Truman Capote famous for being an American writer who wrote “Breakfast At Tiffany’s and “ Cold Blood” 

Truman has a difficult childhood that he manages to leave behind when he becomes famous and surrounds himself with beautiful women who he calls “ his swans” Everybody loves Truman who loves to gossip about people and is always making them laugh. They feel comfortable around him sharing their own secrets over copious amounts of alcohol.

When Truman hosts a black and white ball his inner circle worry that they will be crossed off his list and will do anything to stay in his favour “Now a man of means can no longer be bribed” Descriped as the party that no one could ever equal. 

When he writes his next book “Answered Prayers” his friends can not wait to hear what it is going to be about. Truman says “ It’s called Answered Prayers and if it all goes well, it’ll answer mine”
“I’m constructing this book like a gun, there’s the trigger, the barrel and finally the bullet .And when it’s fired it’s gonna come out with a speed and power you’ve never seen - WHAM”

Imagine their horror when they realise, that although their names have been changed, this story is all about them and is revealing their deepest secrets.

I was fascinated by this book. Surely Truman should have known what would happen when he broke his friends trust writing this book. He thought he was so loved by his friends that eventually he would be forgiven, but this was the start of a slippery slope for Truman sadly drinking and taking drugs to fill the empty void that losing  his friends had created. 

Loved the casual celebrity name dropping. Jackie Kennedy, Sophia Lauren, and many more. I would have loved to be around in such a glamorous time. 

This book had me wanting to know more about Truman and I found myself Googling him and watching interviews he did on chat shows. For me that is a sign of a good book as you got under my skin and I wanted to know more!!

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy in exchange for a review.

Truman Capote, the literary genius, bad boy and chameleon of the 1950, 60 and 70ties, provided enough material for several novels during his excessive life.  I read Melanie Benjamin’s “The Swans of 5th Avenue” last year and had a blast with her gossipy, sparkling, entertaining novel.  When I heard of Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott’s novel “Swan Song” which was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2019, I just knew I had to read her version of Truman’s tragic relationship with his swans. 


Both novels are excellent but different in their prose reimagining Truman Capotes life and that of his swans. “Swan Song” is the more extensive one with 480 pages and the more literary but just as juicy, gossipy and easy to read.  The author weaves back and forth between Truman’s voice and that of his “swans” – the stunning grand dames of jet set society during their time:  Babe Paley, Slim Keith, C.Z. Guest, Gloria Guinness, Lee Radziwill and Marella Agnelli.  Their glamorous lives and friendships were shared with unimaginable luxuries , gossipy, boozy lunches in the eating temples of New York, dream like summer vacations on yachts  in the Aegean or Yucatan, Babe’s beautiful meticulously planned dinners and of course Lee’s access to the Kennedys and Onassis families.  Not to mention Truman's famous black and white ball which went into the history books.

 

They all revealed their most private thoughts and troubles to Truman who in return showered them with the love, attention and affection most of them lacked from their philandering, rich husbands.  He would never betray them unlike their husbands of that they were sure despite Truman’s increasing dependence on alcohol and pills which eventually lead to his ruin.  So what in the world made him betray their love and trust when an article appeared in Esquire with thinly vailed names based on his swan’s lives spilling the beans on their most intimate secrets? The chapters about the consequences of his actions are exquisite;  Greenberg-Jephcott is brilliant in imagining Truman’s and the swans’ emotional rollercoaster after him being banned from their lives, the years that followed after his betrayal and loss of their friendship, all closely based on biographical data. 


“Swan Songs” transported me into a fascinating re-imagined world of a literary yet emotionally crippled genius and his court of beautiful, rich and unusual women. I loved it,   5 stars from me!

There's much that I liked about Swan Song. It's lushly detailed, meticulously researched, elegantly presented. It has a clear love of place, style and beguiling decadence. A vivid cast of society ladies and legendary personalities such as Jackie Onassis and Lauren Bacall, all presented with a keen sense of their interiority as well as their notoriety. 
Capote's character is of course, the centrepiece, and is beautifully realised with his demons from childhood and the scars from the experience of In Cold Blood. He is full of contradictions, petulance and vulnerability. 
The book title is genius - the swans are Capote's women friends with whom he has intense platonic love affairs, and who he later falls out with and betrays. At the end of the novel, the swan metaphor is extended in a pleasing and unexpected way... BUT. 
The book didn't hang together as a whole, especially at the end. The author treated her material with exquisite care but seemed to have far too much of it - a common hazard with a subject that has been researched so conscientiously.  She seemed to tread the same areas again and again. This was a problem at several points in the narrative but especially in the final scenes, as though she had thought of many versions, couldn't decide between them and put them all in. It would have far stronger if she had chosen just one. Instead, we had many runs at the final swan image and Capote imagining his dead friends and losing his mental faculties. . 
This is a shame, because we feel these shocks as deeply as he does, thanks to this author's skilled use of interiority. My verdict - skilful, but flawed and needed a disciplined story edit. I later saw it had won the Women's Prize for Fiction. Did the judges read it all?

I am sorry but I could not get into this book at all. I kept reading but I could not get interested in the various characters. Sorry.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

Fascinating & completely different to books I usually read.  I found this very addictive & I would recommend this to anyone.

Absolutely stunning! I read the entire book in less than a day and loved every single second spent immersed in the brilliant, atmospheric writing.

Truman Capote, mentioned often in tandem with Harper Lee, yet a fabulous writer in his own right. Who would have thought the humble beginnings from which they both started would lead to such fame? If Truman had been a woman he would have been the Queen Bee of any social event, the one whom no one would have dared leave off a list of invitees. As it was he had a special place with his Swans, by inveigling himself into their spoiled over-luxurious lives where nothing was off the menu. As the writer of Breakfast at Tiffany's and Cold Blood he was not short of money and luxury in his own life, but it was his personality that made him almost indispensable to the woman of New York's social elite. For many years he was their confidant, their sister, their love, but he got their delight of him totally wrong by writing articles taken from his book, Answered Prayers, a tome that was never delivered or published, which parodied his relationship with them all by delivering on a salacious plate in Esquire magazine their deepest innermost secrets. I can only think he thought they would find it amusing to see themselves in such damning print, but alas it was not the case. They turned against him, particularly the woman he loved most of all, Babe, who would never speak to him again. From that moment his life was in a downward spiral from which he would never recover. He turned to alcohol and drugs to prop up his need for his friends and his life ended at the age of fifty-nine, too early and without publishing his very last book. This is an amazing literary novel, beautifully and cleverly written and one which I totally recommend. 5 super stars
My thanks to Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott,  Random House UK and Net Galley for my advance copy.

In Swan Song Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott retells Truman Capote’s final years from the perspective of the high society ladies he first befriended and then betrayed.

Did not finish this book, did not like the characters and found it totally confusing.  I shall revisit another time

Oh, darling Truheart! How I loved this book about Truman Capote, the colorful character who penned books you may know (In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany's, to name two). I did not know much about Truman's life beyond the fact that I couldn't think of him without a shiver after reading In Cold Blood during AP English growing up. I knew he was odd, short with a squeaky voice, but had no idea he was such a boozing, drug user genius and so well connected with the social set of New York, and beyond, in the golden era of the 60s and 70s. 

Swan Song has a deliciously gossipy, ultra exclusive feel to it that brings the reader into the heart of the social circle as 'the Swans' recount their embracing of Truman, letting him tag along with them as they travel the world, and how their openness regarding the events in their lives lead to them disowning him. Nothing could be more dangerous than an author who feels he needs to craft another bestseller but is short on material. Hey, why not use the secrets shared in confidence by your closest friends? As we come to find out, there is an amazing amount of scandalous material at his finger tips and the temptation is too great.

I didn't know anything about the social movers of this time - Babe Paley, Slim Hayward, Lee Radziwill, CZ Guest, the dreaded Pamela Churchill and many others were quickly googled as I read to see who they were and if the stories held within Swan Song's pages were true. The content on these amazing women was so beautifully delivered it made Truman's treacherous tell-all chapters in Esquire that much more painful. Though Truman acts despicably, the reader cannot help but pity him as his life crumbles post publishing. 

This really is heartfelt tribute not just for the bazaar little Truman but for the many women who bared their souls to him during their acquaintance. Swan Song is a glorious triumph I cannot endorse enough. It dazzles, not just from the stunningly described locales and events but from the stern stuff these swans are made of.

A fascinating, all-absorbing, deliciously readable account of Truman Capote’s friendship with his ‘Swans': a group of extraordinarily rich and beautiful, accomplished, well-born or well-married women, who had befriended Capote and invited him into their glittering lives of yachts and balls, summers in the Hamptons, winters in Tangiers. The Swans loved Capote; they adored gossip as much as he did, and enjoyed confiding in him - did they know he would spread their secrets within the group as they traded salacious gossip with him? None of them appeared to have imagined that their secrets would end up in Esquire Magazine in two articles, ‘Mojave’ and ‘La Côte Basque’: a brace of thinly-veiled, salacious accounts of real-life high-society gossip, where every ‘character’ was all-too apparently drawn from life, well-known to anyone who knew that circle. The result was disastrous for Capote: his Swans excised him from their lives, cutting him adrift from all that seemed to give his life meaning.
Swan Song tells this story from both Truman’s side, and that of his Swans, who tell their tales as a collective ‘we’. The non-linear narrative takes key moments in every character's life to show where trusts were honoured, and then betrayed. The lack of linearity is no obstacle to the smoothness of the story. The tales come, one after another, like snapshots in an album, and all from a different viewpoint. Narrators are unreliable. Each Swan sees things her own way, and Truman always alters his story for maximum literary effect. Truman’s account of his neglected, lonely, Southern childhood, is told and re-told with no telling ever the same, his own life as much a work of fiction as any of his characters - until his childhood best friend Nellie Harper Lee reminds him, and us, of the truth. Maybe Truman’s early life wasn’t quite so desperate as he wanted his friends, his public, and himself, to believe.
The times, the places, are wonderfully wrought. Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott’s writing casts its own languid glamour over the gilded world Capote shared at his Swans’ discretion, seasoning the known facts with clever fictionalisation, bringing everyone and every-thing to life with effortless grace.
It’s an intriguing tale, that weaves fact and fiction the way Truman did - as the Swans did too, when desperate to hide sordid facts, humble origins, humiliations, betrayals and petty-jealousies. For much of the time, these women are hard to love, they are so shallow and self-serving, but the author gets under their self-obsessed veneers and reveals them as blood and bone women. It is very easy to understand their bewilderment and hurt, how very deeply wounded these women were at Truman’s disloyalty.
Why did Capote betray their trust when he published such a thinly-disguised, barely-fictionalised account of his Swans’ dirtiest secrets? Did he really imagine they would be nonchalant, amused, forgiving, even? Was it simply a wanton act of reckless self-destruction by a man tired of his butterfly life? - Unlikely, given the lengths to which he subsequently went to to get himself back into his Swans’ graces. Their glittering lives were his world and when exiled, life seemed to lose all meaning. Cut adrift, he spiralled into a frenzy of excess that led to his early death, at the age of just 59. It seems it was likely a simple miscalculation, a truly catastrophic gamble that was to cost him everything. His career never recovered. The Esquire articles were said to be extracts from a new novel, ‘Answered Prayers’, that Truman constantly promised but never delivered. In Swan Song, Capote suffers from a catastrophic failure of confidence, terrified of what was expected of him, fearing he could never better his early work, that anything he wrote would fall short and disappoint and so, he simply stopped writing.
But no one knows the truth, so the truth is never given, only possibilities. Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott has done an exhaustive amount of research for this book, which took ten years to write. The facts are the scaffolding. The fascination and the glamour comes all from hearsay and rumour, conjecture and gossip, which seasons the known with a series of maybes as the story jumps back and forth through time and place, but never loses momentum.Though tight with detail, it is an easy read, compelling and hugely-entertaining. I could hardly bear to put it down. I could hardly bear for it to end.

Fictionalised treatment of Truman Capote’s betrayal

I should stress that the 2-star rating is my personal view which seems to be out of kilter with the bulk of other reviewers who loved it.

For me, I couldn’t get into it at all. The writing is good making it quite literary, but it lacks pace and didn’t grab me at all. It covers Capote’s betrayal of his friends towards the end of his life, through a publication disclosing their secrets. I have no idea whether this happened, but it makes for an interesting storyline.

It is rare for me to give up on a book, but in this case, I just couldn’t summon up the energy to carry on reading. There is no discernible plotline in the early part of the book and the whole thing seems ephemeral and lacking in substance.

It can’t be a bad book, due to its critical acclaim, but the subject matter left me cold.

For anyone interested in the genius of Hollywood this could well be a gem.

Pashtpaws

Breakaway Reviewers received a copy of the book to review.

An absolutely riveting story. I enjoyed this very much alothough is different to my usual genre. Very well written xx