Novella November: Breakfast Of Fancy Fakery With Holly Golighty

"Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell", Holly advised him. "You can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get."

I must be in the minority, but as much as I adore me some Audrey Hepburn, I never warmed to her role as Holly Golightly in Blake Edwards' 1961 cinema classic, Breakfast at Tiffany's. I truly disliked the movie when I first saw it, and when I tried watching it again about a year ago, I still felt cold towards it. The iconic and stylish fashions Audrey sported throughout was the only thing that kept my eyes on it, and can we just say that Mickey Rooney in "yellow face" is about the most offensive on-screen performance next to well… Flex Alexander slapping chalk and wet baby powder on his face to portray Michael Jackson? (Yes, that was an actual thing that some people spent money on, recorded, and foisted upon human eyes…welcome to your future nightmares...)

So why read the source material for a film I have such an aversion too? Because books are always often better than the movie (duh) and Truman Capote is one hell of a writer (double duh). He is. He's a natural born storyteller who during his reign possessed the sassiest tongue from the South, and if he was alive today would have the shadiest Twitter log ever. His prose is so delightful and dagger-sharp, and tinged with just the right balance of purple. It's more so lavender and plum --- the relatives of purple --- to where you're whisked into word wonderment while reading, but never do you feel like you're suffocating on adjectives the whole time. He’s also a master at autopsying his characters right down to the atom. Holly Golightly would just be some insufferable white girl in someone’s inexperienced hands, but in Capote's she’s a "wild thing", untamable and feral, with dimensions that rival the facets on the diamonds she longs for from Tiffany's window displays.

Most consider In Cold Blood as Capote's masterpiece, but I don't know, as much as it is the godfather of true crime novels, I enjoyed reading Breakfast At Tiffany's a lot more and found it lingering in my mind longer. Of course, these two tales are incomparable. One is written as fiction, the other as fact; one is set in the rural Midwest, the other in the bustle of New York City. Night and day these stories are, but both books are about desperate, lost people who make poor choices over and over, because they don’t know another way and don’t care to find the exit sign, even when its glowing red in their face.


Hollywood, of course, could never show the boozing, bigoted, and babbling white girl slob that Capote originally created within Holly Golightly. That would...ruin the pristine "all-American white girl" image of the 1950s and 1960s right there. For film, Holly Golightly had to be sweet, doe-eyed and endearing, all fuzzy rainbows and sugar plum drops, a "call girl with a golden heart" who has girl-next-door tendencies. But Hollywood can keep that fantasy. Give me this Holly Golightly, someone to dislike, someone who is intolerable to forms of entertainment, and who gives depth to the faux folly of New York’s hoity-toity. The story is richer and more interesting with a fucked-up Holly Golightly stumbling around in it, trust.

Capote apparently modeled Holly off Marilyn Monroe (and numerous other blonde bombshells of the era) and wanted her in the film role, but, to me, Monroe doesn't seem as coarse and crass as the Ms. Golightly, Traveling presented in the book. Holly Golighty, to me, is akin to Jay Gatsby. Holly may seem like the woman Jay would woo with hopeless abandon, but they are more likely to see a gender switch in their mirrored reflections of each other. Both are homespun ordinaries who have worked hard to blow smoke on their mirrors to where they have deceived a legion of followers, including the droll vanilla men and closeted homosexual narrators who admire and observe them from ample distance, longing to be ensnared in their worlds.

For what they are, I'm actually kind of fascinated by posers, frauds, and faux deeps. You know, those individuals who try to reinvent themselves through drastic means to keep up some sort of appearance or persona, whether they want to seem more intellectual, be another race or simply appear like they are in the center of everything. Social media has made these types come out in droves as it's now easier than ever to place yourself into an ideal image of your creation. All you have to do is photoshop yourself into an illusion, string together some remixed quotes from dirt napping intellectuals, use filters and hashtags, stir in a lot more bullshit, believe your own hype, and voila! you've got a flock of insta-followers. Think I’m kidding? Watch Catfish. Go on Instagram. Scroll through Twitter. See the clusterfuck that is this 2016 election. In plain sight, how they pose, how they lie.

I have known, know people who are Holly Golighty-esque. Some of these people are even in my own family. It's quite an epidemic as Western society revolves too much around "image", and all the superficial parts of it. But like I said, it amuses me, sometimes unnerves me, over how much toil and work goes into being fraudulent. How many lies you have to stack on top of each other and keep straight, how many photos you have to doctor, how much research goes into spinning your own fictitious biography instead of just letting your life ride in the "ugly" truths. There is such a desperation, a deep-seated insecurity to run away from yourself, to ram some fake persona into your own body, and Capote captures that battle so well within Holly Golightly.

The version of Breakfast At Tiffany's I own contains three other stories: "House Of Flowers", "A Diamond Guitar", and "A Christmas Memory". All are good for the most part, especially "A Christmas Memory", where Capote recounts with bittersweet warmth and humor his childhood Christmases with his eccentric fruitcake-making aunt. "House Of Flowers" and "A Diamond Guitar" are about society's "undesirables" (prostitutes and prisoners) and through Capote's turns of phrase he humanizes them in some aspects with their moralistic stories. While these stories have little to do with the main attraction, they are great additions, and will make even the most short-story dissenter take a pause.

The five stars I gave this surprised me, but I truly felt it was worthwhile rubbernecking around the impostors and "wild things" and all the baggage they carry. So watch the movie for romantic fantasy and diamonds, but read this for depth and understanding of what is human fragility.

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from the margins

• Rating: *****
• 178 pages
• Published 2008 by Vintage International // First published 1958

This review was previously published on September 13, 2016. It was edited for format, spelling, and syntax errors --- because I'm a perfectionist like that.