The Wild, Improbable Ride of the Last Mrs. Mailer
By Dwight Garner
Published, New York Times: April 6, 2010

A TICKET TO THE CIRCUS
By Norris Church Mailer
Illustrated. 416 pages. Random House. $26.

Left - Norris Church Mailer with her husband, the author Norman Mailer, and the one child they had together, John Buffalo.
Joel Meyerowitz/Edwynn Houk Gallery

When Barbara Jean Davis — the future Norris Church Mailer — met Norman Mailer at a party in Russellville, Ark., in 1975, she was a high school art teacher and divorced single mother. She’d never flown in an airplane. She had a closet full of polyester clothes. When she took Mailer back to her house that first evening, she poured him a glass of Boone’s Farm apple wine.
Norman Mailer was, well, Norman Mailer: novelist, public intellectual, brawling social provocateur. His best work (“The Naked and the Dead,” “Armies of the Night”) might have been largely behind him, but he was America’s best-known and most notorious writer, as famous for his deeds off the page as on. He’d run for mayor of New York City; been married five times; had stabbed his second wife, Adele, in a drunken fit after a party; and was the impish scourge of feminists. His reputation, like his round belly, preceded him.

In her entertaining new memoir, “A Ticket to the Circus,” Ms. Mailer writes that she found that belly, as well as his “cute little” behind, sort of sexy. Norman Mailer, at 52, may have been twice her age but was “easily the most interesting man I had ever met.” He radiated energy, she writes, “like a little steam heater.” (Ms. Mailer knew from steam heaters. She’d already had a small relationship with Bill Clinton, before he’d married Hillary.)

Before long, Barbara and Norman were a couple. He sent her love letters in the Barry White mold. (“And you, stand-up lady, are golden as the sun.”) She cut his wooly hair and saved the clippings in a white satin heart-shaped pillow. He soon disentangled from his fifth wife and various other lovers. She moved to New York and, for her intermittent modeling career, took the name Norris Church. She became Mailer’s sixth wife in 1980, and gave birth to his son John Buffalo. She was with him until he died, in November of 2007.

“A Ticket to the Circus” is not a tell-all memoir; it’s a tell-enough memoir. It’s Ms. Mailer’s own plucky and sometimes sentimental autobiography, written in the lemony sweet-tea mode of Southern novelists like Lee Smith. It details her Arkansas upbringing in a poor family: her father built roads; the family had an outhouse. At 3, Ms. Mailer won the Little Miss Little Rock contest. She was married by 20, to a man who left to serve in Vietnam, and soon began to hear a voice in her head “telling me I had missed the parade.” Ms. Mailer doesn’t hide the darker elements in her story: her mother’s shock therapy treatments, her own rape by a friend’s older brother. She also includes embarrassing bits other memoirists might have omitted, including goopy letters and poems she sent Mailer.
Read the rest at NYT.