Trudy Ring is a frequent writer, editor, and reporter on literary subjects. In the following essay, she gives an overview of Capote's "A Christmas Memory," concentrating on the portrayal of the character of Buddy's cousin.

Truman Capote often drew on his Southern childhood in finding material for his fiction. He also frequently focused his stories on unconventional, strangely appealing women. "A Christmas Memory" is possibly the best example of a Capote story that exhibits both of these features. Capote described it as his favorite among his stories, and it showed his writing shifting from a preoccupation with the darker aspects of life to warmer and more sentimental subject matter. (He would return to darker subjects later, with In Cold Blood, his account of the murder of a family in rural Kansas.) Capote said he liked "A Christmas Memory" because of the truth in it, but the story...