I just finished reading Kim Powers' book, Capote in Kansas, this week. You can read my review of it on Amazon.com. It's a "ghost story" covering the battered friendship of Truman Capote and Harper Lee, twenty years after both of their successful publications - In Cold Blood and To Kill a Mockingbird.

It must have been somewhere around 1998 when I came across George Plimpton's book entitled Capote, which Powers used as a reference for his book. I remember it well because that was also the first time I was exposed to the World Wide Web, buying my first computer and signing up for AOL 4.0 with the screen name of TruCap22. I know, I know...how sad, but hey I was 22 years old! I couldn't come up with anything better for a screen name than the central character of the book I was reading at the time. Besides, everyone online thought it meant True Capricorn. That, and all the good names like SexyBod22 or AQT4U were taken.

I'd only been out of the closet for four years. I was in college and obsessing over all things dealing with Southern Literature. So reading Capote, and catching up on this odd character from my own Southern rooted gay history, was a given. Truman and I had a lot in common actually. Although I was much taller, he had a mousey voice much like my own, was a bit theatrical, and he had that itch to be a great writer. Though my voice is a bit deeper now and my community theatre days are long over, I still relate and connect with the man much more than any other writer I can think of.

Powers book was a fresh fictional take on Truman's relationship with Lee. Now in his sixties, Truman is haunted by the ghosts of the Clutter family and one of their killers. He picks up the phone and calls Harper Lee one night, a desperate plea to reach out to his beloved childhood friend and confidant who he has been out of touch with for a while.

Now, I'm enjoying Charles Shield's bio on Harper, entitled Mockingbird. Afterwards, I plan to read Harper's one and only book which we all know well. This trip back down South, where my heart still is, has been nice. I don't get to go back there much in person these days although that is where my family still is. Like Truman and a pill bottle or his Orange vodka drinks, the South is a drug, a habit, I cling to anyway I can. I'll never give it up. I'll never let go.

And when I'm not writing about it myself, I have authors like Kim Powers to thank for getting me back there again and again.

-Shannon Yarbrough

www.shannonyarbrough.com

-Author of the book, STEALING WISHES, due out in June!