I just got done reading Breakfast at Tiffany's, by Truman Capote.  I'd always heard about it and had never even seen the movie. Imagine that.  Now I'm glad I haven't yet. I suspect most of what's good about the work is the style of the writing.  I haven't read In Cold Blood, for which I think he is most famous, but that's probably the subject of a different conversation.

Breakfast at Tiffany's is mostly about the power of imagination. Rather, Holly Golightly's imagination.   She reminded me of a foreign exchange student I knew in high school. I can't remember her name, but she was from some Scandinavian country and had the blondest natural hair I have ever seen.  It was short and messy, sort of Drew Barrymore in Mad Love, and she sat next to me in typing class.  By that point in high school, I was starting to come into my own, and there were not very many people who intimidated me.  Dammit, I was a cheerleader.

However, there was something about this girl, let's call her Heidi (I know for a fact that was not her name, but her name was the sort of native Scandinavian name that does not pop into one's head after fifteen years), something a little surreal. She didn't care what anyone thought, which was extremely rare in my town of 5,000. We had all known each other since preschool, knew each other's hot buttons, knew who had a retarded brother and who pulled the wings off flies in second grade.  We knew how to keep each other in line, which is why we all looked so eerily similar.  High school punishment is swift. 

Somehow, though, she managed to escape it, granted that green card of foreign exchangedness.  One day, while wearing a weird skort thing that we didn't have in our mall, she took out a ball-point pen (remember those?) and drew a line from her ankle to high on her thigh, beneath the skort's hem.  It was about two inches in from the natural line of her leg, on the downside, if you will.  I paused from "aaaaa ddddd jjjjj ;;;;;" and asked her what the hell she was doing.

She smiled.  Her teeth were horrible. "That's where my leg ends now," she said.  For me, someone who had stared at her legs in agony for years, certain they were too fat, too slack, too thick at the ankles, too tree-trunk-like, her statement was rather freeing.  The thought of seeing things the way I wanted to see them instead of the way the Stepford Kids did was one that had never occurred to me before.

I hadn't thought of old Heidi in quite a few years, but perhaps she was really Heidi Golightly, come to lose her tabby cat in typing class so that I could begin to change my own perception of reality. After all, it's all relative.  Even in Scandinavia.