When Truman Capote died in 1984, just before his sixtieth birthday, his life had been in a shambles for years. The phenomenal success of In Cold Blood (1966) fulfilled all his dreams, but at that moment he began inexplicably to implode. His crack-up was as public and spectacular as any in recent history. Suffering from what is known as free-floating anxiety, he ingested heroic amounts of alcohol and patronized all the pill-pushing Dr. Feelgoods who flourished in New York during the Sixties and Seventies. He derived no benefit from his frequent stays in clinics and hospitals, often returning to the bottle the very evening of his release. Increasingly detached from his longtime partner, Jack Dunphy, who had been a stabilizing force for him, he embarked on a series of inappropriate relationships, culminating in one with a suburban heterosexual bank official, John O’Shea: this was an insane mésalliance that turned into an orgy of mutual abuse.

The 1975 publication in Esquire of a chapter from his work in progress, Answered Prayers, made him a social pariah: his rich and beautiful friends went mad with rage when they read the thinly disguised, deeply hurtful descriptions of themselves by the adorable little man they had come to think of as a favorite household pet, an ami de la maison. How could he ever have thought he would get away with it? What demon of perversity, what layers of self-delusion could have persuaded him that he could write such things