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Quirkity quirk quirky quirk quirk quirkity Toronto Star quirky quirk quirky Leanne Shapton:

Leanne Shapton is strolling through Greenwich Village wearing Truman Capote's raincoat.

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An art/publishing phenomenon, she bought three of his coats for $120 at an auction that she viewed as a strange and sad narrative of his life, but that led her to think about fresh ways to tell a story.

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Shapton, who was raised in Mississauga and now lives in New York, believes objects can be haunted by their previous owners – and found one of the Capote coats unwearable.

"It had kind of a bad vibe," she says. She took it to Goodwill with a note on its provenance.

The coat she is wearing as she walks along Bleecker St. with Bunny, a compact wheaten terrier, is tan-coloured and shapeless; one button is sewn with mismatched red thread. Yet despite the shabby coat and messy tumble of black hair, she's stylish.

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Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry has been optioned by Plan B, Brad Pitt's production company. Pitt and Natalie Portman have expressed interest in playing the roles of Harold and Lenore.

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The illustrated novel has been praised by Dave Eggers, founder of the publishing house McSweeney's, and writer Amy Sedaris, who is quoted on the back cover saying that she's "jealous."

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It's an understandable emotion; Shapton is the girl who seems to have everything. "My friends and I were having brunch the other day, sitting under some Elvis posters," says Shapton collaborator and writer Sheila Heti, who "portrays" Lenore Doolan in the photographs in Important Artifacts. "We played a game: Who was the most charismatic person we knew? The verdict was: Leanne."

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Shapton's illustrations have been on the cover of Time, in The New Yorker and on book covers for leading publishing houses. Until last year, when she joined The Times, she had a page in Elle magazine called "Jet Setter" in which she used her own paintings and snapshots to document what she ate and where she shopped in places such as Ireland and Morocco – " ...had a perfect cashmere-tweed suit tailored by Michael Frazer..." (The gig was not a completely jealousy-inducing – Shapton had to pay her own travel expenses.)

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[NB: full disclosure.]