Photo by Carrie Lackey
Photo by Carrie Lackey
Photo by Carrie Lackey
Remixed Image by Carrie Lackey/Original image courtesy of Sue Sparklers
Photo by Carrie Lackey
My grandparents “remixed” as Holly and her brother Fred. Photographer unknown
Photographer unknown/Owned by C.Lackey
Mosaic by Carrie Lackey using CC Images “Audrey Hepburn” from Flickr
Version 1 Still Images (above)
Version 1 Text
Preface to the self-published autobiography Holiday Golightly: Please, Call Me Holly
Recently widowed for the second time, I find that I have a lot of time on my hands, and so I find myself thinking about the past. It has taken me quite awhile to drum up enough courage to be honest with myself and with you all, dear readers.
I am often asked where I came from and what am I doing here. It is funny really because I asked myself that same question many, many times over the years, but mostly I am writing my memoir as a way to keep my memories intact. It shall remain my legacy long after my suitors’ memories of me have faded away in to the cobwebbed recesses of their minds.
Orphaned after my parents died from tuberculosis (such an ugly way to die), my sweet brother Fred and I ran away from the so-called foster family we were placed with. One day not long after we ran away, an old gentleman (whom I shall call “Doc”) caught Fred and I stealing eggs from his chickens. He took us in because that’s what men feel the need to do around me. They want to protect me from the world, I suppose.
Later that year I married “Doc” just before my fifteenth birthday. I keep an old worn down photograph of that day in the back of my closet in an old shoebox hidden underneath my stored hatboxes.
Its corners are creased and the image seems to fade just a bit each time I look at it. Taking it out from its hiding place, I rub my finger crippled with arthritis over that wide-eyed child bride with the hope that she is happy the way things turned out.
Life in Texas bored me and moved at a pace slower than molasses. I was never cut out to be a housewife anyway, you know? I shudder to think how mundane my life would have been had I stayed on that farm to raise those kids (from Doc’s first marriage) that were scarcely younger than myself. I shed my old shell as LulaMae Barnes for the more glamorous exoskeleton of Holly Golightly and everything that life entailed.
New York turned out to be everything I knew it would. No one paid the slightest bit of attention to you unless you wanted them to. And honey, let me tell you about the men. They tripped over themselves to be near me, to buy me things and take me places I had only read about.
And the parties in Manhattan…once I met Truman Capote, who wrote a novella (Breakfast at Tiffany’s) based on my life in New York. Like two drunken conspirators we would laugh and giggle about the silly socialites who thumbed their noses at us.
“Holly,” he said to me once, “Don’t ever let them call you a prostitute. You’re really more of a modern geisha anyway.”
Shake your head all you want to, but it was not a bad way to live. I could come and go as I please, but best of all, there was no one to hold me back or tie me down to anything. Sometimes though I went through these blue periods like I was missing out on something, but I could never quite figure out what it was. On those days, I would dress up and slip out into the crowded sidewalk as I made my way across town to Fifth Avenue where I would stand in the window just outside Tiffany & Co looking in. It did for me what nothing or no one ever could.
I tell you all this because I just want to be heard. And, I want you to know that the means, at least for me really did justify the ends. I am not referring to the material means—though I am surrounded by nice things. It is more than that. I just thought you should know that.
With that, I will leave you to read about my time in New York and the one great love I loved and lost without ever really knowing the effect it had on me until years after the sound of his voice had all but faded from my memory.
Yours truly,
Holly Golightly
Version 1 Sound
Version 1 Moving Image
Please, Call Me Holly 