[Statement about Norris Church and their marriage]
Mailer's short statement on his marriage to Norris Church Mailer, written to accompany Mariana Cook's photograph of the couple in Couples: Speaking from the Heart (2000): 'She is in command. He hovers in the background.'
Mailer’s short prose statement on his marriage to Norris Church Mailer, written to accompany Mariana Cook’s photograph of the couple in Couples: Speaking from the Heart (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000, 54–55). Studying the picture “as if I did not know these two people,” Mailer writes that Norris “seems so strong, so beautiful, so centered. She is in command. He hovers in the background” — and that the two are held together by “a hundred relations with each other,” twenty-one years on, “and have not lost interest.”
A full transcription is at full text.