Machismo Isn't that Easy to Wear
Oliver Burkeman's Guardian interview (5 February 2002), with Mailer about to turn 79 in Provincetown: 'Machismo is that faint zephyr I can still barely hear on the other side of the hill,' plus a reckoning with the 1960 stabbing of Adele.
Read an excerpt (rights pending)
“Machismo Isn’t that Easy to Wear” (published in The Guardian as “Norman Mailer on what it means to be macho”), Oliver Burkeman’s interview of 5 February 2002, finds Mailer about to turn 79 in Provincetown: “Machismo is that faint zephyr I can still barely hear on the other side of the hill.” He reckons again with the 1960 stabbing of Adele — “the worst elements of it have been digested over the years … It’s our children who suffered with it more than we did.” (Lennon flags several factual errors in the piece, including one Burkeman inherited from the Dearborn biography.)
A full transcription, held in the working archive pending rights clearance, is at full text.