Squares with everything I know about Capote. He was not to be trusted, and I've never particularly liked In Cold Blood.
Truth and fiction, and literary truth, or relevant truth, has always been an interesting topic to me. I don't know why Capote would say it's non-fiction if it's not, but he struggled a lot of health and mental wellness more than he put out to the public, so I don't want to speculate on it. It would have been far more interesting if he truly opened a discussion of truth vs. fiction.
My absolute favorite example of this is from one of my favorite authors, Tim O'Brien, in The Things They Carried, where he discusses multiple times the difference between real truth and story truth, and what they mean, and which is more true: the actual events that happened, or the meaning of the story provided by an account which isn't exact, but captures more of what's important.
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It's hard to summarize his points throughout the book without reading it, because it's all important to form this point, but a nice piece is from this review written here
Through a close examination of the multiple-perspective method of storytelling, and the resulting ambiguities, of one pivotal event in The Things They Carried, it becomes apparent how O’Brien’s novel supports both of these premises. Paradoxically, although common sense might suggest that the use of this kind of ambiguity would contradict the truth-value of the book, in O’Brien’s case, it is a necessary component that actually serves to strengthen it. One of the key incidents that demonstrates this is the death of O’Brien’s friend and fellow soldier Kiowa.
Represented in various ways across four chapters, the story of Kiowa’s death remains ever mysterious and changing, and no one seems to be able to find the words to tell it properly. In the chapter “Speaking of Courage,” the reader is shown, through the post-war musings of Norman Bowker, the grim death of Kiowa on a rainy night in a Vietnamese sludge field. In “Notes,” O’Brien writes of how he was inspired to write the story and talks about the process that he went through in doing so, and in “In The Field,” we see Kiowa’s squad searching for his body the morning after his death. Finally, in “Field Trip,” O’Brien travels back to Vietnam to leave Kiowa’s moccasins at the place he died.
The only element strictly common to all of these accounts is that Kiowa remains dead at the end, and as the event continues to shift shape before the reader’s eyes, it is easy, and perhaps even natural, to begin to doubt the value that we might have otherwise placed in it. We may begin to feel that O’Brien is cheating us somehow or at least that he is not playing according to the rules. If we dig deeper, however, we can see that, even though he may have changed the rules to suit his purpose, we are still able to determine what the new rules are.
A quote that seems to fill well for that article as well: