Can a writer ever get out of the way? Norman Mailer, The Executioner’s Song and what happened after In Cold Blood

Truman Capote had a problem. He was too good a writer.

In In Cold Blood, Capote took the murder of the Clutter family in Kansas and transformed it into literature. He created suspense, reconstructed conversations, moved between perspectives and, most troublingly, made us understand Perry Smith. 

Capote removed himself from the book, but he was everywhere in its choices. He decided where we looked, what we knew and when we knew it.

So after writing about In Cold Blood, I was left with another question. What happens if the writer tries to get out of the way?

Thirteen years after Capote's book appeared, Norman Mailer offered an answer. Sort of.

Can you trust Truman Capote? In Cold Blood, true crime and what happens when murder becomes literature

A little while ago, I asked a question that probably isn't advisable for somebody who spends quite a lot of time writing about other people.

Can you ever really trust a writer? Rachel Cusk's Life of M got me thinking about it. Joan Didion provided the warning. And Truman Capote wandered briefly into the argument, having spectacularly demonstrated what can happen when a writer's friends discover that the funny little man at their dinner table has been paying considerably more attention than they realised.

Can you ever really trust a writer? Rachel Cusk, Natalie Portman and the dangerous business of becoming somebody’s material

In the preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion leaves us with a warning.

'Writers are always selling somebody out.'

It is a wonderfully typical Didion sentence. It's cold, precise and just self-aware enough to make the betrayal sound almost professional.

Reading in the liminal: The books that hold us between seasons

There is a particular kind of reading that feels like standing in a doorway, neither fully in nor fully out.

Not every book asks for deep attention, but some arrive quietly and stay with you longer than expected. They don’t rush to a resolution or pull you along with pace. Instead, they hold space, for a mood, a shift, a moment that hasn't yet found its shape.

When pop stars read serious books: what book clubs mean now

Once upon a time, the book club was a quiet affair. A circle of friends, a bottle of wine, and a novel discussed with enthusiasm or polite disagreement. Then came Oprah, and everything changed. Her televised picks turned literary taste into a shared national ritual, making authors overnight sensations and cementing the idea that reading could be collective, not solitary. 

But today’s book club looks very different. When Dua Lipa recommends This House of Grief to her 90 million followers, or Florence Welch posts her annotated copy of The Bell Jar, something deeper is at play. Reading has become performance, identity, and, unexpectedly, power.