This is an opinion column

A friend of mine gave me an early Christmas present. It was a book I already had: “A Christmas Memory,” by Truman Capote. It features two unlikely friends, both outcasts.

He’s seven years old. She’s sixty-something, with a mental age of less than that. They’re distant relatives in the small Alabama town of Monroeville, and the people they share a house with have to put up with them. He’s been sent to live there since his mother was between marriages in New Orleans, or in a new relationship where a small child wouldn’t fit, like a shoe that was the wrong size.

Truman Capote’s compact book, “A Christmas Memory,” was published by Random House in 1966, and became a Christmas classic over the years. It had first appeared in “Mademoiselle” magazine in 1956 and was made into two television films, first in 1966 and then in 1997, when actress Geraldine Page played the part of Miss Sook Faulk, the distant cousin and young Capote’s best friend.

I rediscovered it when it appeared in a freshman composition text and my college students wrote their own Alabama Christmas memories. We’d been studying the narrative essay, with its strong story line and description, and Capote’s book—a mere 30 pages, was an example of how to write in this way.