“I’ll never get used to anything. Anybody that does, they might as well be dead.”
Breakfast at Tiffany’s is our first read of 2026 for #classiclitclub 📖✨ and despite it being one of my favourite films, I’d never read the book. It’s rare that I enjoy the film more than the book, but for this one, I’m making an exception. In my opinion, the film is way, way better. 🎬💔 Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly is iconic ✨, and while reading the book, I couldn’t help but hear Holly’s lines in Audrey’s voice.
I think Holly is incredibly lonely and somewhat immature—although I’m pretty sure she knew exactly what she was doing when she relayed Sal’s weather report. 😉 Holly is running from a life she didn’t like and ended up in New York 🗽, where, let’s be honest, she keeps on running—though maybe not physically. As one of our book club members said, Holly is a survivor 💪, and given what she’s come through, she’s had to do whatever she can to get by, whether that’s mixing with criminals or taking up with unsuitable men. 💍🚬
About the Book
It's New York in the 1940s, where the martinis flow from cocktail hour till breakfast at Tiffany's. And nice girls don't, except, of course, for Holly Golightly: glittering socialite traveller, generally upwards, sometimes sideways and once in a while - down. Pursued by to Salvatore 'Sally' Tomato, the Mafia sugar-daddy doing life in Sing Sing and 'Rusty' Trawler, the blue-chinned, cuff-shooting millionaire man about women about town, Holly is a fragile eyeful of tawny hair and turned-up nose, a heart-breaker, a perplexer, a traveller, a tease. She is irrepressibly 'top banana in the shock deparment', and one of the shining flowers of American fiction.
About Truman
Truman Capote was an American writer whose non-fiction, stories, novels and plays are recognised literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and In Cold Blood (1965), which he labeled a "non-fiction novel." At least 20 films and TV dramas have been produced from Capote novels, stories and screenplays.
He was born as Truman Streckfus Persons to a salesman Archulus Persons and young Lillie Mae. His parents divorced when he was four and he went to live with his mother's relatives in Monroeville, Alabama. He was a lonely child who learned to read and write by himself before entering school. In 1933, he moved to New York City to live with his mother and her new husband, Joseph Capote, a Cuban-born businessman. Mr. Capote adopted Truman, legally changing his last name to Capote and enrolling him in private school. After graduating from high school in 1942, Truman Capote began his regular job as a copy boy at The New Yorker. During this time, he also began his career as a writer, publishing many short stories which introduced him into a circle of literary critics. His first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, published in 1948, stayed on The New York Times bestseller list for nine weeks and became controversial because of the photograph of Capote used to promote the novel, posing seductively and gazing into the camera.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Capote remained prolific producing both fiction and non-fiction. His masterpiece, In Cold Blood, a story about the murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, was published in 1966 in book form by Random House, became a worldwide success and brought Capote much praise from the literary community. After this success he published rarely and suffered from alcohol addiction. He died in 1984 at age 59.
