I’m in New York City for the first time in seven years, sleeping on an air mattress in the corner of my childhood best friend’s apartment in the middle of Times Square. What was originally meant to be a casual weekend visit, my first time seeing him at NYU, turned into something else entirely. Quickly realizing he was incredibly stressed by his midterm exams, I stepped out alone for a day, deciding to follow Holly Golightly and the narrator’s footsteps through Manhattan.
From the moment I arrived, I was struck by the drastic difference between my friend’s life here and mine in Los Angeles. Over dinner after I landed, I asked him if living in New York ever felt lonely. We’d grown up together in the same tight-knit community in Shanghai with the same school, neighbors, and friends, until I moved away to Portland. That move was incredibly difficult for me, and I had automatically assumed that his transition to this vast, chaotic city must have been disorienting. At USC, I live with three roommates, a five-minute walk from nearly everyone I know. But in New York, my friend told me, he’s almost always alone. When class ends or fraternity events wrap up, he goes back to his room. Throughout the entirety of my weeklong stay, the only real interactions I observed were fist bumps to the security guards at his building door. And yet, he says he never feels lonely. Surrounded by millions of pedestrians on the street and living above one of the busiest streets in the world, he always feels the presence of people. These people, although faceless and nameless, serve as a kind of quiet companionship to him. For my friend, the city buzzes with a collective and infectious energy. Yet, at times, I felt it buzzed with absence.
The disparity between our perceptions fascinated me and lingered as I stepped into the world of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. In Holly and the narrator’s relationship, I started to recognize the same feelings, especially the way they drift through the city, always surrounded, yet somehow still alone.
Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a novella told through the eyes of an unnamed narrator, who recalls his brief but vivid relationship with his neighbor, Holly Golightly. When they first met, Holly was young, drifting through life in Manhattan. She sustained herself through her performance of charm and self-invention, finding herself in romantic entanglements and weekly visits to a mob boss at the Sing Sing prison. As the narrator becomes more involved in Holly’s world, he uncovers her complicated past, including a child marriage, a brother she adores, and a resistance to being entrapped. At its core, the novella is about freedom and the impossibility of truly knowing someone who refuses to belong to anyone or anywhere.
I started my walk on the Upper East Side with my phone, my camera, and a vague sense of direction. To be honest, I felt like a bit of a cheat as Holly Golightly’s apartment was listed as a landmark on my maps app, thanks to the fame of the novella’s 1961 film adaptation starring Audrey Hepburn. It was strange to see this fictional character’s residence plotted on the screen like any other tourist destination. As I made my way up East 71st Street, I saw the brownstone buildings that lined the block like long, elegant corridors. Each building looked nearly identical to the last, and I found myself glancing back and forth between my phone and the street signs, worried that I’d miss the apartment completely. Then, there it was: A striking blue door. It was a splash of color amongst the endless shades of brown. Something about it felt exactly right. Like Holly herself, I thought the door had its own sort of charm. One could have easily walked past it and overlooked it, but once it caught my attention, it was impossible to forget.
Standing outside of Holly’s apartment, I started to think more deeply about this character I had been following. Holly is charming, funny, a bit naive, but very unstable. It is nearly impossible to read Capote’s novella without recognizing the trauma buried beneath her carefree facade. Married at just 14 years old to the man who took her and her brother in, she is introduced in the novel after renaming, relocating, and reinventing herself. Her behavior is erratic as she floats through her extravagant socialite lifestyle, and her choices become self-destructive. Like New York, Holly’s chaotic nature is a part of her allure to the narrator. Although some would view her as unwell, through the narrator’s eyes and in the backdrop of the city, she is instead presented to readers as captivating. Her trauma is a mystery. Her instability is framed as eccentricity. I couldn’t help but notice how similar that felt to the way the city presents itself. It’s easy to get overstimulated in New York. The honking, the shouting, the endless motion – it can all feel like too much. The city feeds on this chaos. It embraces it. Just like Holly, the city does not smooth out its edges. There is something about the unpredictability, the sense that anything could happen, that makes it feel exciting. To some, it can feel overwhelming. But to New Yorkers and those who romanticize life in the city, it’s what keeps it alive.
From Holly’s apartment, I walked down to the corner of Lexington Avenue in search of Joe Bell’s bar. In the novella, Joe is the one who calls the narrator with news of a sighting of Holly, who has disappeared. Joe is protective of Holly, and he and the narrator share a sort of bond over their intrigue of her character. I wanted to see where Capote would place a character like this. But when I arrived at the location, I was met with a brick building under major renovation. Its black door and windows looked like they could have once led to a neighborhood pub, but now they were completely sealed off. There was no hint of what the space used to be, leaving it completely up to passersby’s imaginations. For a moment, I stood there, unsure of what to do. Unlike Holly’s apartment, which felt like a deliberate landmark, Joe Bell’s bar had disappeared. Without a plaque or a sign, it was just another piece of the city erased.
Maybe that’s the most honest part of bookpacking Capote’s New York. It refuses to stand still. The city is always evolving and moving forward, even if that means erasing the places we’ve read about or imagined. I never traveled to New York with the expectation of finding the perfect scene from the novel. I knew the version of the city I read about wouldn’t last forever. In five years, or maybe even one, this building will belong to something entirely different. It could be a gallery, a bakery, or perhaps someone will put another bar here for Joe Bell and Capote’s work. And if I were to bookpack Breakfast at Tiffany’s again, the experience would be completely different. This stop uncovered the true value of walking through fiction for me, as I can still see traces of the novel in the city, no matter how faint.
I left Lexington Avenue and began the walk toward Central Park. Initially, the route took me through quieter streets lined with brownstone buildings. As I walked, I started noticing birds, first one perched outside an apartment building, then a whole flock that scattered into the air as I stepped too close with my camera. They were startled so easily that I struggled to grab a clear shot of them. For a moment, I felt a sense of empathy for Holly. She must have seen something similar on these streets. It was a strange sensation as I thought I began to understand why birds meant so much to her. There’s something sacred about the freedom they have. The way they never let you get too close. The way they continuously move and migrate to new places. One second, they’re in front of you, and the next, they vanish.
In the novel, Holly gives the narrator an empty bird cage as a gift. The narrator originally sees the cage in a storefront and fantasizes about filling it with exotic birds someday. But, Holly wants nothing to do with it. For her, the cage represents the exact opposite. It represents everything she is afraid of: confinement and permanence. She tells Joe Bell that “if you let yourself love a wild thing. You’ll end up looking at the sky” (Capote 59). This does not serve as a warning. Rather, it’s a truth for Holly. Loving someone like her means accepting they’ll never completely belong to you. They will always be moving towards something else. The sky now serves as a more beautiful way of describing the empty space of where they used to be. As I walked and watched those birds disappear into the air, I realized New York feels the same way. Full of moments you want to hold onto, but can escape in an instant.
As I continued my journey towards Central Park, I stopped by an Italian sandwich shop tucked between storefronts and designer displays. I was no longer walking by the quiet brownstones, instead, I was now in a sea of tourists carrying shopping bags. Even though I had only walked about twenty minutes from where I started, it felt like I’d stepped into an entirely different city.
When I finally reached the park, I was almost relieved to find it empty. It was a cold, gloomy afternoon, keeping most people away from lingering in the park. I picked a bench facing a tree that was just beginning to bloom. Amidst the grey skies, its branches had pink blossoms, a sign of spring breaking through. For the first time all day, I was not navigating crowds or looking over my shoulder. It was quiet. Completely still.
Sitting there, I realized why Capote placed one of the novel’s most emotional scenes in Central Park. The stillness I indulged in reminded me of when Holly brought the Narrator to ride horses. As he looked at her, he thought that he “loved her enough to forget [himself], [his] self-pitying despairs, and be content that something she thought happy was going to happen” (Capote 69). This moment is one of the most honest things the narrator admits to in the novella. It is not so much a romantic declaration of love, but rather a form of emotional surrender. For once, he is not trying to cling to Holly. He simply wants her to be happy, even if this happiness means she will eventually leave him behind. Though Holly’s story spirals into chaos after this, especially with her arrest, this moment in the park is almost a quiet climax or emotional peak for the narrator. It serves as the direct manifestation of what happens when you love a “wild thing,” as they cannot be tamed or controlled.
As I sat on that bench, watching the wind move the branches of that blossoming tree, I couldn’t help but feel something similar. Central Park, with its walkways and quiet natural landscape, felt like a release from the daunting corridors of brownstone streets. I knew I was about to head off to Fifth Avenue, a complete change of scenery again that I anticipated would lead to sensory overload. Maybe that is why Holly brings the narrator here. Not just to ride horses, but to finally be able to breathe.
Continuing my journey onto Fifth Avenue was everything I imagined. It was loud, bright, and alive with motion. I saw extravagant designer outfits. Tourists shouted over each other as they hailed cabs. Every person seemed to carry a different colored shopping bag from a different luxury brand. Navigating the sidewalk felt like dodging through an obstacle course. Just before reaching the flagship Tiffany store, I stopped in a crowd gathered on a street corner. Everyone was pointing their phones to the sky. I turned and saw a massive Louis Vuitton suitcase, towering above the sidewalk like some surreal monument dedicated to consumerism. This street in New York almost felt like an area where fantasy and reality blur under the glow of these designer storefronts.
It was exactly the kind of overwhelming chaos I thought Holly Golightly wanted to escape from. She explains her love for Tiffany’s incredibly clearly: “What I’ve found does the most good is just to get into a taxi and go to Tiffany's. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there” (Capote 32). That line always struck me as a bit romanticized, but upon stepping into those doors, I understood her. Outside, there was noise and movement. Inside, everything slowed down with elegance. A doorman greeted me politely. A sales associate in a perfectly tailored suit asked if I was looking for anything specific. She then noticed my camera and told me that photography was not allowed in the store. I was ready to put it away, but first explained that I was working on a project about Breakfast at Tiffany’s, retracing the characters’ steps and writing about how the novel interacts with the city. After a brief conversation with the store manager, they unexpectedly gave me permission to quietly take photos.
In a space that almost felt impenetrable, the fact that they had taken the time to listen to me caught me off guard. I had anticipated a firm rejection. But maybe this is what Holly meant. Beyond the diamonds, Tiffany’s felt absolutely composed. The glass displays were spotless and perfectly arranged. Couples examined rings with hushed excitement. The sales representatives smiled warmly and moved gracefully. Even the children in the store sat quietly as their parents browsed. For someone like Holly, whose life was constantly in motion, Tiffany’s was far more than just a store. It had the illusion of stability. Here, the rules are incredibly clear and everything is in order. It appears that nothing could possibly go “very bad” to anyone in that store. I found visiting the store with Holly’s perspective, where everything was so carefully constructed, oddly comforting.
By the end of the day, I was exhausted. My phone battery was low, and my feet hurt. But as I stood outside of Tiffany’s, watching the taxis drive and people rush by, I felt at ease. Walking through the city with Breakfast at Tiffany’s in mind gave me a better understanding of what it means to be alone in a place full of people. At the start of the day, that idea unsettled me. But now, I realize that perhaps you don’t need to know the names of the people around you to feel connected. Perhaps it’s just enough to share the space, to walk through the same streets, to breathe the same air. I understood what my friend meant a little more.
When I eventually come back to New York in a few years, I’m unsure what I will find. If I were to follow this same route, most of these places would likely look different. Others may be completely gone. I’m grateful I decided to follow this novel for a day because I got to see traces of them while they were still here, and in doing so, I saw a bit more clearly what Holly was trying to say all along.