In Another Place: With and Without My Father, Norman Mailer
Susan Mailer's 2019 memoir of her father, Norman Mailer — a psychoanalyst's account of her intense, complex relationship with him, her five stepmothers and eight siblings, and a life divided between Mexico, Chile, and New York. An about-Mailer book.
Susan Mailer. In Another Place: With and Without My Father, Norman Mailer. Northampton House Press, 2019.
A memoir by Susan Mailer — Norman Mailer’s eldest child, born in 1949 to Beatrice Silverman Mailer, and a practicing psychoanalyst in Chile. The book tells the story of her relationship with her famous, combative father, of growing up shuttling between her mother’s home in Mexico and New York, of her five stepmothers and eight siblings and “the joys and pains of being part of the large Mailer clan,” and of a life lived between cultures — “someone who belongs everywhere and nowhere.” It opens, fittingly, with The Naked and the Dead and the fame it brought her father at twenty-five.
The memoir drew advance praise from Colum McCann, Larry Schiller, J. Michael Lennon (who wished he had “had her memoir in hand when writing my biography”), Kaylie Jones, and Greg Bellow. Within The Mailer Review 13.1 (2019) it occasioned both Lennon’s interview with the author (“Interview with Susan Mailer”) and Erik Nakjavani’s psychoanalytic review (“Attachment, Abandonment, and Reconciliation”).
Related pages
- Susan Mailer | Beatrice Silverman
- 2019-lennon-interview-susan-mailer | 2019-nakjavani-attachment-abandonment
- About this project
- The Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays of Norman Mailer (13.1)