D AV I D PAT R I C K C O L U M B I A and fortune fifteen years ago. This was her second time reading for Literacy Partners; she is one of the few who’s been invited back for a second reading. This time she read from Lit: A Memoir, which was published last November, a selection about her wedding day to a rich WASPy New Englander. I was laughing so hard that Lesley Stahl, who was sitting in front of me turned around to see who the nutcase was with the uncontrollable laughter. Karr was followed by David Finkel, the Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist from the Washington Post who read from The Good Soldiers, published last year. His selection was
about a young soldier who was shot in the back of the head by a sniper in Iraq but lived and was brought back to Bethesda where his young wife was with him almost every minute to care for him. This was a profoundly sad and deeply frustrating story, as sorrowful as Karr’s was funny, and there were certainly few dry eyes in the auditorium when Finkel finished. Finally, Norris Church Mailer read from her recently published memoir, A Ticket to the Circus. Norris is, as most people know, the widow of Norman Mailer, married to him for twenty-seven years, and the mother and stepmother to his many children.
She has had quite a life and, at this point, has proved herself also to be a great writer. Raised in Arkansas as Barbara Jean Davis, she met Norman by chance when he visited for a reading engagement. She was excited and delighted to meet the great American novelist but never imagined that he would one day be her husband. At that time she was divorced and had a small child. After the brief encounter blossomed into a relationship, she came to New York to continue what was at first an affair, and had no plans for marriage. In her early days here she worked as a model and a soap-opera actress and lived
independently—financially and otherwise. Her memories are disarmingly frank and candid—and often very funny. She read a section about her first winter in New York, still financially independent from Norman but discovering that she wasn’t always able to meet her needs. For example, coming from Arkansas, she didn’t have a warm enough coat for the harsh New York winter of ’76-’77, nor the money to buy one. This led to a fantasy she had about owning a fur, particularly a fox. This coat finally did come her way, and her story about how it did was as funny as Karr’s story about her wedding day.
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