Tuesday Book Club: Answered Prayers

The Scandal, the Mystery, and the Fragments That Remain

This week’s Tuesday Book Club pick is Answered Prayers by Truman Capote—a book that’s as famous for what’s missing as for what exists. Capote promised it would be his magnum opus, the American À la recherche du temps perdu, a razor-sharp exposé of Manhattan’s elite. What we have is just a fragment, three dazzling, scandalous chapters that caused a social earthquake and left the literary world wondering: What happened to the rest?

What’s Answered Prayers about?

The existing chapters—"Unspoiled Monsters," "La Côte Basque 1965," and "Kate McCloud"—are pure Capote: biting, beautiful, and dripping with insider gossip. He writes with the elegance of Breakfast at Tiffany’s but laces it with the venom of a poisoned pen. Real names are barely veiled. High society secrets are spilled without mercy. It’s no wonder many of Capote’s closest friends shut their doors to him after its partial publication.

Capote called it his Proustian masterpiece, the tell-all to end all tell-alls. But as legend has it—and as Vanity Fair explored in a recent piece—Capote never finished it. Some say he couldn’t. Others say the rest was written but mysteriously disappeared. The literary world still debates whether there are hidden chapters locked away in some dusty archive or lost forever.

Why read it now?

There’s something electric about reading a book that feels unfinished, like wandering through the ruins of a grand estate and imagining what might have been. What’s there is stunning—sharp dialogue, merciless character sketches, and Capote’s unique ability to make beauty and cruelty sit side by side.

It’s also a time capsule of a vanished New York, where power and privilege were played out over cocktails and dinner parties, and one well-aimed sentence could bring it all crashing down.

Let’s talk about it

Have you read Answered Prayers? Do you think Capote ever finished it? And if he did, where is it? Or maybe what we have is all there ever was—a perfect scandal left hanging in the air, unfinished and unforgettable.

Join the conversation at #TuesdayBookClub and #AnsweredPrayers on X (formerly Twitter) and Bluesky. We’d love to hear your theories, your favourite moments, and whether you think Capote’s masterpiece is still out there, waiting to be found.