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

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Greenberg-Jephcott's debut is a devastating read that blurs the lines between vulnerability and narcissism; sex and power. And, ultimately, it is Capote's self-destruction that will have you racing breathlessly towards the end The Pool 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. A vivid debut … based on ten years of research, this is a dazzling read that’s been worth the wait Image Magazine

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. Secondly, large parts of the book are written in the first person plural by the "swans" of the title, the women whom Capote gathered around him and who told him the secrets that he exposed in Esquire magazine. To me, this felt odd, like some kind of Greek chorus roaming round the book en masse. Because that's the other issue at the heart of this: I love the concept of reframing a traditionally male-dominated narrative by using women's voices - it's a concept that's carried through many of my favorite Greek mythology retellings quite soundly - but here it falls flat, because Greenberg-Jephcott never makes a convincing case for why this is a story that need reclaiming. A bunch of high society women have affairs and sail around on yachts and they're betrayed by their close friend but... so what? This books feels like an elaborate revenge fantasy that's so mired in gossip and cattiness that it loses its thematic heft. The people who work in the theatre are a motley crew of individuals – essentially good people in need of a lifeline from their troubled lives, and the theatre provides it. The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died.”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. 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!! But if the intention of the author was to give the Swans their voice, all she does is succeed in portraying them as shallow, narcissistic, disloyal, self-obsessed, needy and obnoxious. Greenberg-Jephcott brilliantly captures those occasions, how Capote’s charm sprinkled everything with “magic dust”, how they’d be “wrapped in the cocoon of conversation, doubled with laughter at his witticisms”. Until, fatally, he overstepped the mark and revealed in print what they confided in private. Swan Song is a whirlwind tour of private jets to Mexico resorts, playboys’ yachts in the Mediterranean, Manhattan martini lunches and so much scandal ... [A] riveting novel Red

In November 1965, "La Cote Basque", a chapter from Truman Capote's work-in-progress, Answered Prayers - The Unfinished Novel, was published in Esquire magazine. It was a thinly veiled and very unflattering expose of the lives of Truman's circle of society friends. It's publication led to those friends deserting Truman and, in turn, to his gradual decline until he eventually died in 1984.A dazzling debut about the line between gossip and slander, self-creation and self-preservation, SWAN SONG is the tragic story of the literary icon of his age and the beautiful, wealthy, vulnerable women he called his Swans. He seduced us [them] all with his words – and Truman knows full well the power of words. They’re both armour and weapon, the one thing he’s sure of. They alone have never failed him, their lyricism hinting at the beauty trapped within his stunted body, not to mention his conflicted soul.”