If you need some salty tears in your fruitcake, have we got the one for you. We’re talking about Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory,” originally published in Mademoiselle in 1956. It’s his semi-autobiographical short story about a young boy’s friendship with his way-older cousin in 1930s Alabama and their alienation from the rest of the adults in the family, something that most of us can relate to. We talk about writing childhood, outsiderness, and the troubles with reading autobiography.

We read the version in Vintage’s The Complete Stories of Truman Capote. We mention it in the show and recommend Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley’s collection Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children.

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