Love of My Life
The memoir of Mailer's sister, Barbara Mailer Wasserman, published at ninety-four in 2021. An account of growing up beside her famous brother in Depression-era Brooklyn and of a bright, adventurous woman's life from postwar Paris and a prisoner-smuggling errand out of Franco's Spain to Greenwich Village in the 1950s.
Love of My Life is the memoir of Barbara Mailer Wasserman, Mailer’s younger sister, published in 2021 when she was ninety-four — her first book. It is at once an account of being the sister of “the most controversial American writer of the post-War generation” — a man who, as she puts it, “always made the air bounce” — and a portrait of a generation of bright, adventurous, and often frustrated women.
Wasserman recalls the Mailer household of Depression-era Brooklyn, where the young Norman was treated like a prince under their “fierce, opinionated mother” — “the world felt Jewish, even though I knew it wasn’t.” On her fifteenth birthday her brother gave her Moby-Dick and Freud’s An Introduction to Psychoanalysis; she followed him to Cambridge, entering Radcliffe in 1943 while Norman went to war. Told in her senior year that if she did not want to teach she “had better learn shorthand,” she went to Paris instead.
The book preserves a first-hand glimpse of the moment Mailer learned he had become famous. On a 1948 motoring trip through Europe with Barbara and his first wife, Beatrice, Norman opened forwarded mail at the American Express office in Nice and found that The Naked and the Dead had hit the bestseller list: “‘Gee,’ he said in a small boy’s voice, ‘I’m first on The Times bestseller list’” — “the last time,” Wasserman writes, that Norman spoke “with a small boy’s voice.” Other chapters recount helping smuggle two political prisoners out of Franco’s Spain with the writer Barbara Probst Solomon, and the Greenwich Village of the 1950s.
The novelist and playwright Ron Fried reviewed the memoir warmly at Head Butler (7 November 2021), calling it “not merely an account of what it was like to be the sister of” a famous brother but a record of “what life was like for a generation of extremely bright and adventurous — and often frustrated — women.”
Related pages
- Barbara Mailer Wasserman | Barbara Probst Solomon | Beatrice Silverman
- The Naked and the Dead | 2021