An Interview with Kim Powers, Author of Capote in Kansas: A Ghost Story

by

Lisa Guidarini

The enduring fascination with author Truman Capote has been especially obvious over the past few years, with the appearance of two feature films and the publication of his essays and letters as well as his previously “lost” first novel, Summer Crossing.

Capote was a genius, but what may inspire as much interest as anything he ever wrote was his eccentricity and incredible popularity followed by the almost complete obscurity he fell into in his last years. Kim Powers’ novel, Capote in Kansas, speculates on what may have been going on near the end of the writer’s life, how his lifelong relationship with Harper Lee first sustained then threatened to destroy him, and how Lee herself was affected by this man who was both character and caricature.

Capote in Kansas also delves into the enduring marks left on both authors by their close investigation of the Clutter family murders, the basis for Capote’s In Cold Blood. Powers incisively handles the dual forces at work within Capote, the one side yearning for enduring literary fame and the other side that found what he had to do in order to get the story repulsive. The book deals with the demons inside the great writer, imagining what battles he may have fought as he realized his life was nearly over. The book is affecting and deeply wise, and a fine imagining of what may have been.

It was a pleasure interviewing Kim Powers who is an Emmy and Peabody-winning writer. He’s worked at both ABC’s Good Morning America and Primetime. More can be found about him at his web site.

BiblioBuffet: What aspect of the Capote/Lee relationship inspired you to write a fictionalized book about them?

Kim Powers: I had seen the movie of To Kill a Mockingbird when I was a kid and was very haunted by it: the black and white photography, the beautiful Elmer Bernstein score, the opening credits of Scout digging through her cigar box of “play pretties” (as we called toys in McKinney, Texas.) And the story and relationships, of course, and the portrait of two kids being raised by a single father after their mother had died—as mine had when I was seven. I thought I was watching my childhood on film.

Sometime later, I learned that the model for the character of Dill Harris, the strange little boy who comes to visit every summer, was based on Truman Capote. I was still young—maybe junior high by then? —but I was very precocious and pretended to know a lot more about Truman Capote than I did, like who he actually was and what he had written. I began seeing him more as a personality than a writer on all those talk shows he did during the 70s: Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin. He even appeared as an actor in that Neil Simon movie Murder By Death. Then I began trying to learn more about him as a writer, and became enchanted by “A Christmas Memory” and the sadness of it.

So I became obsessed by the fact that these two children (Capote and Lee) grew up next door to each other, and then reunited decades later in Kansas, when Truman asked Harper to accompany him to Kansas as an assistant, to begin the work that would become In Cold Blood. (Supposedly one of the reasons he asked her is that she was the one friend of his he thought would be ballsy enough to buy a gun to take with them!) I thought it was so bizarre that these two writers most of us thought as being so sensitive and lyrical, would be attracted to something as dark and bloody as a true crime story. Harper said of Truman’s invitation to that story: “It was the deep calling the deep.” I completely understood that, the fascination with the evil that could have caused the Clutter murders.

Anyway, long story a little bit shorter, I thought few other people knew that fascinating story of their childhoods together, and their reunion in Kansas. Those were the only two tent poles I had as I began my novel. About three quarters of the way through my writing, I read of the two competing Capote movies in the works, both of which centered on their time in Kansas. It was one of the bleakest days of my life, the thought that I had worked so hard on something I thought was so secret, and now the whole world was about to find out before I could get my book published!

That didn’t change my writing, though, and ultimately I realized I was writing about the legacy we all leave behind: is it enough? On the last day of your life, when you look back (and the novel does more or less take us to the last day of Truman’s life), do you feel complete, as if you’ve done the best you could, or do you leave with the regret of so many things left undone. For Harper, it’s the question, Is her one book—as well read and beloved as it is—enough? Did she say everything she wanted to “pass on” in that book?

BB: These two writers are an example of the fine literary output of the American South. Do you have any thoughts as to why the South tends to turn out such immense literary talent?

KP: I’m sure I’m misquoting here, but Eudora Welty once said something to the effect, “If you survive a Southern childhood, you have enough material for the rest of your life.” I might amend that to say if you survive childhood period you have a lifetime of material. Maybe it’s the sense of history and the sort of Gothic legacy the South has, where eccentric characters and situations are somewhat taken for granted, and where you have many generations of family and relatives to dig back through. Even though I’m from Texas—and I now considered myself a “lapsed Texan” —I gravitated much more toward deep-fried Southern writers when I was growing up. A few years ago, I went to Savannah and Charleston, and I loved the dripping Spanish moss and the haunted houses and the forgotten cemeteries. Texas doesn’t have that, and the Midwest and California certainly don’t. I guess New England, where I’ve spent my life for the last two decades, has similar but different charms.

BB: Why do you think Harper Lee has not, to date, written another book? Any guess as to whether she’ll leave behind a memoir or another novel?

KP: I’ve got a few ideas, but they’re all my own speculation. She certainly intended to. In interviews she did in the early 60s, after Mockingbird, she said she wanted to be “the Jane Austen of South Alabama.” So she had other books in mind. She talked about being well into a second book, and even referenced some beginning ideas for a third one. I think pulling Mockingbird together as a book was very torturous for her. It began as a series of short stories called Atticus, about Scout’s lawyer father (based on Harper’s own father, Amasa.) I think I read it took about three years of hard work to sort of “glue” it all together to form a novel, and not just a series of anecdotes. The editor who guided her through that, Tay Hyhoff, retired, and was no longer there to be a mentor.

Maybe the joke is on us. Certainly after the phenomenon of Mockingbird, she could have written a phone book and it would have been published. Maybe she just thought the quality of the writing wasn’t as great as it was in Mockingbird. She later started saying—or maybe it was her sister speaking for her—that “After you start at the top, where else is there to go?” I don’t think Harper had any clue of the success Mockingbird would go on to have.

But I privately think—and I certainly allude to this in Capote in Kansas—that she witnessed, first hand, the kind of scrutiny that Truman was under, that he reveled in, and just didn’t want that. I think she was something of a Boo Radley, who wanted to do her own thing and not be dragged out in the light of day. In my book, I place her in a scene she didn’t participate in in real life, but that Truman died. Truman forces her to confront something he thinks about her, that she’s not ready to commit to, or be a part of. In my thinking, it’s the centerpiece of the book—and the reason she and Truman broke off their friendship, and she retreated from fame.

I came across some interesting research, that in the 90s, I think, she began researching another true crime book. It was to be called The Reverend, about a minister in the South who killed several members of his own family. She evidently went to the courthouse every day to research it and take notes; some people recognized her as the famous Harper Lee, and to others, she was just a sweet little gray-haired lady. But even with that, it seems as if she began realizing she just didn’t have it in her to finish a book any longer.

I’ve heard indirectly from people who are knowledgeable about J.D. Salinger and his situation that he has continued writing all these years; whether those stories or novels will be published after his death is another question. But I don’t think that holds true for Harper. I don’t think we’ll discover a treasure trove of books to finally be published then.

BB: Aside from Truman Capote and Harper Lee, which other writers have influenced you?

KP: I read voraciously as a kid, some good stuff, a lot of silly mysteries like Nancy Drew, but also great children’s and YA authors like Lois Duncan and Zilpha Keatley Snyder and E. L. Koningsburg and Madeleine L’Engle and Elizabeth Goudge. I think those readings planted a sort of mystery formula in my head: something happens, and then you spend the rest of the book solving it. I also spent several years more or less unsuccessfully writing screenplays, and I think that influenced a sort of suspense in my writing. Something has to keep you turning pages.

But when I got to high school, I was very involved in drama and speech, and did all these speech contests where you read short stories. I read so many great writers then: John Cheever, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers (whom I worshipped), Shirley Jackson, Peter Taylor, Tennessee Williams (his plays), the poetry of James Dickey, Graham Greene, Joyce Carol Oates, Jane Bowles. (I think those sort of Southern Gothic writers gave me permission for the grand opera of my writing, the extreme and bizarre situations, the ghosts.)

I’m embarrassed to confess it, but my readership of the greats is very limited: Jane Austen, Charles Dickens. In high school and college when I should have been reading those things, I became such a drama geek that they slipped by. (Young writers, do not use me as an example! I’m a bad one!)

BB: What influenced you to become a writer? Was there any one person who inspired you to choose this career?

KP: The person who probably most inspired me to be a writer was a great writer that the world at large never got to see as such. It was my twin brother Tim, with whom I was obsessively close. I write at great length about our relationship, and his ultimate death from AIDS, in my first book, my memoir The History of Swimming. He could write circles around me, but sadly, had a lot of life challenges that kept getting in the way of his writing: alcoholism, emotional problems. The earliest drafts of Swimming were not much more than collections of his letters to me, which were as exquisite as finely-tuned short stories. I wanted to share them with the world, and finally had the honesty to write about the events surrounding them. I had kept myself from writing for so long—not even in a conscious way—because he was the writer in the family, not me. As tragic as it was, his death liberated me to write, but I’ll admit I was doing it for him, and to showcase his writing, at first. Only later—and it’s still a very faltering thing—did I begin developing the confidence to “own” it for myself.

BB: How does the experience of writing fiction compare to the other genres you write? Do you find writing one particular genre more challenging than another?

KP: Writing is tough, period, no matter what you’re writing. I love re-writing, but sitting down (as the cliché goes) to that first blank page is a killer. Even though I’m getting better at it, I still have this silly ritual that’s sort of stream of consciousness, at least at first: closing my eyes and just letting go, whatever images come up, and writing ’til my hands are ready to blow up. Then I’ll go back and look at it and maybe have a handful of salvageable sentences.

Writing a memoir, for me was very hard, because I wanted to be scrupulously honest in it, and that meant reliving so many painful things. You can’t go into one unless you’re willing to do that and expose yourself. And I relive things bit by bit, by taste, by smell, by color, by sensation, by feeling. Or at least I try to.

But even the novel, Capote in Kansas, has a great deal of my autobiography in it. Maybe every writer does that, and you just use whatever you can to get to the next sentence. But without quite realizing I was doing it, my description of the sweating face of Son Boular, the real person I think was the basis of Boo Radley, became the face of my dying brother, as he was on a gurney pumped full of morphine, sweat pouring off his face like I had never seen in my life. Harper walking through a funeral home to see the body of her deceased older brother was the exact thing I experienced when I viewed my mother’s body as a child. You use what you have to try to make things come alive.

BB: Are you currently planning to write another book? What projects are coming up next for you?

KP: I’ve actually (more or less) finished a third book that my agent will start shopping soon. It’s a novel, but a very autobiographical one, called The Movies I Watched: The Year My Father Killed My Mother. And yes, as the title suggests, it’s a comedy. Not really . . .  

It’s about a little boy whose mother dies, and bit by bit he becomes convinced that his father killed her, so he could marry the woman he’s having an affair with. The boy obsessively goes to the movies every Saturday afternoon (as I did, along with the library) and he begins using the adult lessons he observes in them to try and play detective and catch his father. The book becomes a sort of scrapbook, as the little boy clips out the movie ads and pastes them in (and I have those actual ads as part of the book) and his writing about the movies spills over into him writing about the family life around him. It’s another mystery, of a sort. What really did happen to his mother?

After I finished an early draft of Capote, my boyfriend and I started a great tradition of me reading my books aloud to him. We originally did it to kill time on our long eight-hour drive to Provincetown where we used to go every summer. So over these Christmas holidays, I’ve been reading the new book aloud to him. It’s a great way to hear what’s working and what isn’t.

And I even have a title (and a smidgen of plot) for the book after that: Mr. Kim’s School of Jazz, Tap and Ballet. I’m determined for it to be funny, with no visits to a cemetery in it!


Lisa Guidarini subsists, almost entirely, on her twin passions of reading and writing (running just ahead of her love for Goose Island beer and Asiago cheese). Her day job, unsurprisingly, is at a public library where she works as Adult Program Coordinator for the Algonquin Area Public Library District. (To this day, she still wonders that people really pay her for the privilege of working in a library.) By evening, she is a graduate student in a distance learning program through the University of Wisconsin—Madison’s School of Library and Information Studies. In her spare time she tends to her family, including one husband, three children, and two rambunctious Jack Russell terriers. She also enjoys digital photography, visiting old cemeteries, and the occasional old-fashioned road trip. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, she also blogs about anything literary or otherwise interesting. You can reach Lisa at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it