49 pages • 1 hour read
Laurence LeamerCapote's Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Laurence Leamer
Laurence Leamer is an American author and journalist best known for his biographies of American political families. Born in Chicago, Leamer was raised in upstate New York and received a BA in history from Antioch College in 1964. After college, Leamer served with the Peace Corps in Nepal for two years before being awarded a Ford Fellowship for graduate study in international development at the University of Oregon. While at Oregon, he began writing magazine articles and was awarded an International Fellowship at the Columbia School of Journalism. After graduation, his work was published in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, and Playboy, many of the same publications that published the work of Truman Capote.
Most of Leamer’s 19 books focus on American politics and celebrity culture. He is widely regarded as an expert on the Kennedy family. The Kennedy Women: The Saga of an American Family (1994) details the lives of Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, Rosemary Kennedy, and Jackie Kennedy, while The Kennedy Men: Rules of the Father (2001) focuses on Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy. Leamer’s research on the family informs his depictions of Lee Radziwill, sister of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, in Capote’s Women.
Leamer’s previous work on celebrity culture also informs his research for Capote’s Women. His 1986 book As Time Goes By: The Life of Ingrid Bergman explores the sometimes painful cost of celebrity, while King of the Night: The Life of Johnny Carson positions American celebrity culture as particularly damaging. Since writing Capote’s Women, Leamer has published Hitchcock’s Blondes, a study of the famous director’s female muses. In 2025, he will release Warhol’s Muses, which focuses on the models and fashion icons in the artist’s orbit. Like Capote’s Women, these books reflect Leamer’s fascination with charismatic women and the men drawn to them.
Literary Context: Narrative Nonfiction
Narrative nonfiction, also known as creative nonfiction, is a literary genre that bridges the gap between fact and storytelling. Works of narrative nonfiction weave real-world events and factual accounts with traditional narrative techniques in an attempt to immerse readers in the world of its subjects. Travel writing, food writing, personal essays, and biographies often fall into this genre, as they seek to both communicate information and evoke an emotional response through the use of literary tools like dialogue, sensory language and imagery, character development, and the use of narrative arcs.
As Leamer notes in Capote’s Women, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) is a seminal example of narrative nonfiction. The novel, which chronicles the 1959 murder of the Clutter family in Kansas and the subsequent investigation, combines meticulous research with evocative prose. Although other writers had experimented with narrative nonfiction prior to Capote, In Cold Blood redefined how real-life events could be presented in literature and set a benchmark for the genre. Another example, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), uses author Joan Didion’s personal experiences in California to capture the social and cultural turmoil of California in the 1960s.
In Capote’s Women, Leamer uses character arcs to add dramatic tension and suspense to the narrative. He relates events from the lives of Truman and the swans as literary exposition, crafting scenes and weaving in dialogue to imbue his narrative with a novelistic structure and tone. Leamer renders key moments from the swans’ lives in vivid detail—such as when Nancy “Slim” Keith’s father pulls her out of class to tell her he’s leaving her mother—delivering dialogue in the voice of the characters. He introduces each of the swans as a novelist would introduce their characters, using the details of their lives and circumstances to establish both the sociocultural context of mid-century New York’s elite social values and the ways in which these glamorous women appealed to the highest aspirations and deepest scorn of his protagonist—Truman Capote.
