This year marks the centenary of Truman Capote's birth (and my father's, too!), so it seems like a good time to reflect on his legacy. And this is especially the case since he's as much in the news now as when he died in 1984, what with the hubbub surrounding a new book, "Capote's Women" and the series based on it, "Feud: Capote vs. The Swans." This current revival centers on the fallout from Capote's "La Cote Basque, 1965," the second chapter from his unfinished novel, "Answered Prayers." 

The novel was a conceived as a roman-a-clef and intended to be a second-half-of-the-century rival to Marcel Proust's monumental "In Search of Lost Time." But the fallout from the publication of "La Cote Basque" in Esquire magazine in 1975 was swift and devastating. The "Swans," a group of high-society women who had befriended and confided in Capote, excised him from their lives for what they saw as a betrayal of their secrets, which were only thinly veiled in "La Cote Basque."