"For all here chic thinness, she had almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap and lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening in the cheeks. Her mouth was large, her nose upturned. A pair of dark glasses blotted out her eyes. It was a face beyond childhood, yet this side of belonging to a woman. I thought her anywhere between sixteen and thirty; as it turned out, she was shy two months of her nineteenth birthday."
-Truman Capote
Nobody knows for sure how much of a disguised autobiography Breakfast at Tiffany's really is. Half of the women that Truman Capote knew claim that Holly Golightly is based upon them. What we certainly know is that Miss Golightly embodied the aspirations of American women. It is not hard to track the pretentiousness of Lady Gaga to the lightness and carelessness of Holly.
Holly Golightly is like a modern Madame Bovary: both of them are naïve women who think that they are liberated when, in fact, they are nothing but pieces of exchange in the males' games of honor. The only difference between them is that Holly succeeded -that's why she's not considered a whore.
The humor and mood of Breakfast at Tiffany's turned out to be the basis of modern TV series. Back in the 1940's it was almost impossible to see the word lesbian published in any book, or even said in any city outside NewYork. Today we at least can watch a show called The L-Word.
There's a Hollywood version of Breakfast at Tiffany's. I still have to see it, but I'm sure that it's a decaffeinated version of Capote's book. That's Hollywood's specialty.
You can find a preview of the book here, via Google Books.
And below is Capote himself reading an excerpt of the book:
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