Introduction

Truman Capote and Harper Lee were children when they met. Twenty-five years later, Capote had taken New York's literary world by storm, while Lee struggled to put pen to paper and sweat out the story of her childhood in the same city.

They would reunite in the desolate plains of Kansas to create In Cold Blood. And they would start talk of an even greater mystery: What happened between them — and who really wrote To Kill a Mockingbird? How did two innocents from a backwoods Southern town achieve such fame, and why did they stop speaking to one another?

Kim Powers has conjured a death-bed confession from Capote, in which he picks up the phone to Harper Lee one last time to tell her is being haunted — a tale she doesn't believe, until she is forced to. What do the ghosts of the Clutters want, as they appear one by one to confess their secrets and their anger to the most unlikely mediums of Capote and Lee?

Capote in Kansas is an unforgettable "what might have been" — a fantasia of ghosts seeking resolve and revenge, and memories and regret for a past that was, that will never be again.

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Excerpt

“She’s back. She’s after me.”
Those were the first words Nelle had heard from him in–God, twenty years? However many years it had been, it was so long ago she couldn’t remember. She just knew that it had been another time, another place. ... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

1. Did you previously know these basic facts of the relationship between Capote and Lee – that they were next door neighbors as very young children, and that they reunited again to work onIn Cold Bloodtogether?

2. Who would you say is the more important character in the book, the protagonist the book “belongs” to – Truman Capote, or Harper Lee?

3. If you’ve read To Kill a Mockingbird, doesCapote in Kansasenhance your understanding of it; who Harper Lee was as a little girl, what her relationship with her lawyer father Amasa was, what her relationship with Dill Harris (aka Truman Capote) was, the role Boo Radley played in the neighborhood?

4. From reading To Kill a Mockingbird, how did you imagine the author Harper Lee – and how does the portrait of her inCapote in Kansasagree with that – or not? What was the most surprising thing to you about Lee?

5. Since relatively little of the book actually takes place in Kansas, do you feel like the title is misleading? What other possible titles come to you after reading the book? Is the inclusion of the subtitle “A Ghost Story” provocative – or unnecessary?

6. Does the author’s disclaimer that this is a work of fiction (and his note detailing what’s real in the book and what isn’t) help you read this as something basically made-up – or did the fact that it’s about real people cause you to read it as more of a biography?

7. Have you ever done the same thing Truman Capote did to Harper Lee – call an old friend up out of the blue, after a many year absence? Why did you do it? What were you expecting to be the result?

8. How did you interpret the “ghosts” of the Clutters? Did you accept them as real ghosts coming to visit Truman and Harper, or figments of their imagination, or dreams? Why did they need to see Truman and Harper – or is it better to ask, why did Truman and Harper need to revisit THEM?

9. From how the events in Kansas were described in the book, what lasting effect do you think investigating the murder of the Clutter family had on Truman and Harper? Was it something they were eventually able to let go of, or did it haunt them for the rest of their lives?

10. Why do you think the fictional Truman, at the end of his life, started sending these mysterious packages to Harper Lee? Does he seem as if he’s aware that he’s in his final decline, and he doesn’t have much time left to make whatever lasting peace he has to make with her? Why did he chose something so macabre – sending pictures inside little handcarved coffins – as a way to making peace?

12. Does Harper’s “legacy” – just one book -- seem to pray on her, the same way it does to Truman? What do you think of Myrtle’s reflection on the legacy she will leave behind: the smell of wet clothes on a clothes line? Do you have to leave something “big” as your legacy?

13. When a book is as good asTo Kill a Mockingbird, is it “okay” that the author never wrote another one? Is one great book the equal of several lesser ones? As an artist, did Truman Capote or Harper Lee have an obligation to continue writing for the public?

13. Does what the author has done to Truman Capote and Harper Lee – writing versions of their lives – seem to mirror what Capote and Lee did with the Clutters? Do you think that was deliberate on the author’s part? Even further, do you think the author was making an even bigger statement about that, as he wrote how Harper Lee turned parts of the life of Son Boular into Boo Radley?

14. What would these fictional versions of Harper Lee and Truman Capote say were the happiest times of their lives? Their childhoods? The time of their greatest fame, when their well-regarded books came out?

15. How were you affected by the relationship between Truman Capote and his housekeeper, Myrtle Bennett? Do you find it ironic that a man of such great fame and wealth would have one of his most intimate relationships with an uneducated maid, that he pays to work for him?

16. What was your reaction to the two letters Harper Lee writes to her dead brother Ed? Did it seem an effective device to let you into her inner-most thoughts, or did it seem bizarre, and unlikely? In the context of the book, did it make sense that the fictional Harper Lee would do something so unrealistic? Can you think of any other way the material in those letters might have been handled?

17. As monstrous as Truman Capote is in certain chunks of the book, and by reputation, what is your final opinion of him, by the end? A monster – but you understand why? Someone sad and sympathetic? When the kite unfurls the words “I’m Sorry” in the very last line of the book, do you think the character of Harper would respond, “You’re Forgiven?”

18. What do you think the real Truman Capote would have thought of the book? The real Harper Lee? If the book had been written as a “roman a clef” – where it was clearly about the characters of Capote and Lee, but their names had been changed – would it have been as effective?

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