Mrs. Mailer On Norman

“I always said I wasn’t going to write about Norman because no one would believe it,” Norris Church Mailer once said, but now she has written a memoir about her marriage to the novelist. The final of six Mrs. Mailers, Church dealt with Norman’s insecurities turned machismo, his cruelty and violence, and his affairs with other women. But rather than fight Norman’s fire with her own, she was often reticent about her concerns. “Is marital honesty overrated? Mrs Mailer makes a good case. People used to rudely ask her which wife she was. ‘The last one,’ she would say. ‘As naive as it was,’ she writes, ‘as farfetched as it seems looking back now, I was right.'”