“The secret of of immortality, for you, Truman, is to write. Keep writing.”
I feel like they honestly could’ve ended this series at episode four with Truman taking in Kate as a sort of pseudo daughter, Slim retracting her claws a little, and the last moments between Babe and Truman on the street. But that’s not enough drama. Still, the relationship between Kate and Truman was interesting. He gives her writing advice like “eavesdrop” and she tries to keep him on track/off the sauce. CZ continues to be one of the only Swans still friends with him as the 70s continue and she also tries to encourage his writing. Truman says that his career is now just being a personality, not a writer.
Meanwhile, the Swans deal with the changing times and the social stigma with being an aging woman. C.Z. and Babe have an interesting conversation about how much they owe to gay men for being their “walkers” and all I could think of was when I used to go to gay bars on Halloween so I wouldn’t get hit on. When Babe dies, the show does do a good job of showing how grief and loss can effect people in small ways.
Truman starts to hallucinate Babe after her death and remembers when he read Breakfast at Tiffany’s to her before publication. She guessed who Holly Golightly was based on and he promised never to write about her. He wanted to make the end of Answered Prayers just about her. The last few episodes are just about him trying to stay clean despite public scandals and his loneliness as Jack and the last of his friends go on to healthier relationships. Jack, who was a writer in his own right, stated that worried how everyone would bother him to put together the unfinished bits of Answered Prayers if Capote died without finishing it.
In the last year of his life, Feud shows Capote’s downward spiral through attempting to write out an ending to Answered Prayers where he attempts to apologize by giving each Swan a better ending than reality did.
The scene in which he dies in Joanne’s house is made to look like the end of this life revolved around what happened with the Swans, even given Truman some final words about Babe, even though I thought his final words were “It’s me, Buddy” suggesting that he was hallucinating his favorite aunt. Maybe he said both. I don’t know. I wasn’t there.
This is not really about Capote’s full life. There’s really no mention of his aunts who raised him, his friendship with Harper Lee, or, other than the ghost of his mom, his actual time living in New York as a youth. I know this isn’t a biography, but I feel like it’s rather one-dimensional to say he was only the way he was because of his mother. Then again, maybe that was on purpose in order to reflect on how he made his own friends seem one-dimensional in the unfinished Answered Prayers.
