Who better than Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott, author of the masterful Swan Song , to chat to our BPA Long Writing Weekend crew about the writer’s palette? Kelleigh opened her session with a quote from writer Truman Capote, who inspired her fictionalised debut novel. This is a first novel of extraordinary skill, a book of which Capote would have been proud" -- Alex Preston * The Observer * Cults hold morbid fascination – none more so than the Manson “family”. Cline focuses on its female followers, as idealised through the eyes of 14-year old Evie Boyd. When Evie spots them in a Petaluma park in the summer of 1969, she is mesmerised: “The day was disturbed by the path the girls cut across the regular world. Sleek and thoughtless as sharks breaching the water.” She’s drawn ever deeper into the group, led by the charismatic, Manson-esque “Russell”. Here is the clique as elective family. 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. A rich, sharp, sting of a book. It made me laugh and grimace and pity monsters. I'm still smiling about it" -- Stu Turton, bestselling author of THE SEVEN DEATHS OF EVELYN HARDCASTLE

Truman considered himself to have had an unloved and harsh childhood which he used as a trade to entice others into revealing their hidden secrets. Mixed with his engaging and alluring language he bewitched many people, particularly the wives, whom he called his Swans, into believing he was their confidante. With wine and words, he seduced them into divulging all. 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!!After his Mother abandoned him he must have felt very ambivalent about women and perhaps was incontrovertibly drawn to them, yet wanted to punish them (and thus perhaps unconsciously punish his mother). A tortured soul who indeed perhaps wasn’t, as he feared, altogether loveable. After all, a caring mother, if she loves her child, wouldn’t abandon her child and therefore she must have abandoned him because he was so unloveable (a common extrapolation that features in people with abandonment issues). Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.”― Truman Capote.

Before the session, Kelleigh asked attendees to send in examples of evocative fiction. Here’s what the group came up with: Born and raised in Houston, Texas, Kelleigh lives between Los Angeles and London. She earned a BFA (Directing) from Carnegie Mellon University, studied screenwriting at the University of Southern California, and has been honoured by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as a Finalist for the Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting, among numerous screenwriting accolades. She was awarded the Abroad Fellowship in Provence in 2006, where the germ of an idea for a novel about Truman Capote’s betrayal of his inner circle was born. After a decade of research, Kelleigh began Swan Song, her debut novel, in the UEA/ Guardian Masterclass, completing it four years later on the UEA Prose Fiction MA, from which she graduated with Distinction. The narrative idea was apparently to write a revenge tale, where the socialites (the "swans") tell their side of the story, and the author introduces a "we"-narration with shifting points of view, which doesn't always work, but is quite interesting. But make no mistake, this is not about empowerment or feminism: The swans sound like absolutely terrible, shallow people who used to hang out with Capote because he was kind of exotic and amusing. They are not glamorous, they are completely void. Capote is turned into a caricature, regularly referred to as "the boy" when he is already a grown-up man (you could argue it's to maintain some connection to the narrative thread about his childhood, but it's derogatory), he is the "elfin" with the "girlish voice", he is a "twisted little cherub", he says sentences like "Weeeelllll, you seeeeeee, Gore was drunk as a skunk, quelle surprise" - I'm sorry, but women who talk about a homosexual man like that are not "beautiful, wealthy, vulnerable women" (the blurb), they are mainly idiots. Granted, Capote himself was known for his vicious comments and he betrayed their trust, but the whole set-up of the story suffers from the fact that everyone is just terrible, and I don't feel like this was an intentional narrative decision. This novel is based on a fascinating real-life story, but I was bored out of my mind reading it: After spending years with the rich and the famous, writer Truman Capote published a text called "La Côte Basque 1965" in an issue of Esquire magazine in 1975, which was intended to be part of his new novel "Answered Prayers" (the unfinished book was then published posthumously in 1986). In it, Capote spills the secrets of some of his high society friends, their thinly veiled identities easy to decipher for contemporary readers. As a consequence, Capote lost many of his closest female friends, socialites who felt like he sold them out for personal gain, while he argued that, well, he's a writer, so he writes. Can a novel be simultaneously frenetic and yet long drawn out? I found Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott’s take on Truman Capote to be an overly fractured and somewhat frustrating read. Capote’s swan song – he sold the revelatory chapters from his long-awaited book ‘Answered Prayers’ to Esquire magazine – angered his coterie of female friends and brought the curtain down on an illustrious if erratic writing career. (Capote created the character of Holly Golightly for ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ and pioneered the non-fiction novel genre with his controversial ‘In Cold Blood’.)Written in 1978, republished in 2010, The Clique follows rookie reporter Gunn Goater, who arrives in London from the provinces, eager to cover the impending demise of Winston Churchill. Waiting outside his subject’s residence, he spies a “little crowd” of five, theatrically dressed, epitomising the Swinging 60s that eluded him in Lincolnshire. The Clique is a sharp work of postwar, pre-Thatcher satire, set against crumbling communal flats and love-ins – a milieu to which Gunn is wholly unsuited. Cochran, Peter (2014). Small-Screen Shakespeare. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. p.289. ISBN 9781443869690 . Retrieved 21 April 2019.