Swan Song: Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2019

Product Information

Premise:Truman Capote, having reached the pinnacle of literary success after In Cold Blood’s wild acclaim, decides to drop a “literary grenade” in 1975 that will transformhim from society’s darling to persona non grataby betraying the confidences of his inner circle, mid-20th century society’s wealthy and powerful elite – the women he called his ‘Swans’ and collective narrators of Swan Song. You've always lived a life of pretense, not a real life-- a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real. Jephcott is married to author Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott. They have collaborated on screenplays selected by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Nicholl Fellowship, the Austin Film Festival, [9] and Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope. 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.

While true that Proust's novel did include barely disguised portraits of real society figures, his reputation as perhaps the finest writer of the first half of the 20th Century rests not on that but on the quality of his prose. Similarly, with a very different but unique style of his own, Thomas Bernhard, the most important writer of the 2nd half of the century - his The Woodcutters even the subject of a lawsuit. 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” Swan Song is a deft, dazzling, diligently researched creation, in which the lives of various members of elite, powerful, old-moneyed families, such as the Roosevelts, Kennedys, Bouviers and Churchills, are verbally dissected over Martini-drenched lunches. Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott spent ten years researching this novel, which was named winner of the 2015 Bridport Prize Peggy Chapman-Andrews Award for a First Novel, in addition to being shortlisted for the 2015 Myriad Editions First Drafts Competition and the 2015/16 Historical Novel Society New Novel Award. I hope we won't have to wait so long for her next book.

His swans immediately ostracised him – “the imp had turned twisted goblin, with a dark shade around him” – as drugs, drink and regret tarnished the end of his life. 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. Jephcott appeared in two episodes of Midsomer Murders as two different characters; "Death's Shadow" and seven years later in 2006, "Four Funerals and a Wedding". And it is this later point that lead to the incident which is the central focus of the book a set out here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truma... ,the publication in Esquire of “La Côte Basque 1965", the beginning of the novel “Answered Prayers”, an undertaking which is seen by Capote in this novel as doing for 1960-1970s American society what Proust did for earlier 20th Century France: but by the swans as a gross betrayal: their ire perhaps being greater due to their sudden horror at their own naivety in trusting a writer who invented the genre of nonfiction novel.

This is part a fictional biography and part the biography of a work, in progress for over twenty years; “Answered Prayers.” Capote befriended the rich and famous and delighted in their company and their confidences. Even as a child, Capote is shown as always watching, listening and absorbing the conversations of the adults around him. His closest childhood friend, the ‘to be famous in the future,’ Nellie Harper Lee, may have been able to warn his future Swans, after Truman inserted her mother’s vicious gossip into a short story, which caused a minor, local furore, long before “Answered Prayers,” was thought of.

Theirs was a shimmering set, dressed in Dior, heading to Europe on yachts and private jets, lunching in the best restaurants and sharing secrets with Capote, whose Southern cadences seduced them into telling stories they shouldn’t. Capote was their improbable confidant, the vertically challenged, blond, dirt poor gay boy-man up from Alabama to New York, with a captivating self-invented persona, bolstered by the great talent which made him a wildly successful writer.