Signature Colors

A different color of ink identified each year: 1956 was green and 1957 a ribbon of red, replaced the following year by bright lavender, and now, in 1959, she had decided upon a dignified blue.  But as in every manifestation, she continued to tinker with her handwriting, slanting it to the right or to the left, shaping it roundly or steeply, loosely or stingily--as though she were asking, "Is this Nancy? Or that? Or that?  Which is me?"

---Truman Capote, In Cold Blood (1966)

Truman Capote's "non-fiction novel" In Cold Blood was inspired by the murder of the Herbert Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas in 1959.  In this quote, Capote recreates the character of Nancy Clutter, the family's sixteen year old daughter.   While Capote's characterizations can become tedious at times, he offers a valid interpretation of what is an almost universal teenage activity---filling notebooks with variations of one's signature.