Garson is a professor of English and a frequent contributor to literary journals. In the following excerpt from a longer chapter in a book, she discusses "A Christmas Memory" in terms of its autobiographical elements and its similarities to Capote's novel A Grass Harp, which also fictionalizes the author's youth.

Capote's ability to combine comedy, nostalgia, and a child's sense of tragedy is nowhere more evident than in the story "A Christmas Memory." Declared by Capote to be his most cherished piece, it is more overtly autobiographical than anything else he has written. The author has said that the child in the story is himself and the elderly relative, his cousin, Miss Sook Faulk. He further emphasized the reality behind the fiction in "A Christmas Memory" by having a childhood picture of himself and Miss Faulk reproduced for a reprinting of the story in 1966, ten years after...