2000
A between-books year. Mailer rebuts Mary Dearborn's biography in the press, quietly begins the years of research and writing that will become The Castle in the Forest, and tours the festival and interview circuit — Edinburgh, Australia, a New Yorker festival pairing with Martin Amis — talking about feminism, corporate capitalism, religion, and the Clinton scandal. He contributes a tender statement on his marriage to Norris for the photography book Couples.
Setting the record straight, and a secret book
Mailer opened the year correcting Mary Dearborn‘s Mailer: A Biography (99.8) in a New York Times letter, “Just the Factoids” (00.1) — insisting he had read Das Kapital and never shared a Provincetown house with Roy Cohn, and dismissing Peter Manso as “a bilious ex-friend” (see 02.8). By midsummer he was letting slip that he had begun “a secret … and it’s big” book (00.6) — the project, begun after two years of research, that would become The Castle in the Forest (07.10).
The festival and interview circuit
Much of the year was talk. He gave long, revealing interviews to the London Times (00.4), The Scotsman (00.7), and — around the Edinburgh International Book Festival — The Guardian (“At 77, Mailer gives up on the Sexual Revolution,” 00.8), the Independent on Sunday (“God’s Foot Soldier,” 00.9), and Australia’s Radio National (Ramona Koval’s omnibus, 00.12). A Der Spiegel transcript (00.10) returned him to the 1960 stabbing of Adele: “I had always thought I was a good man … Suddenly this incomprehensible catastrophe.” He appeared with Martin Amis at a New Yorker festival hosted by David Remnick (00.11).
A word on the marriage
For the photography book Couples: Speaking from the Heart, Mailer wrote a short statement on his life with Norris (00.13): “She is in command. He hovers in the background” — twenty-one years on and “have not lost interest.”
Related pages
- 1999 | 2001
- “At 77, Mailer gives up on the Sexual Revolution” | Statement about Norris Church | Mary V. Dearborn
- Mailer: A Biography (99.8) | The Castle in the Forest (07.10)