Fighting for One's Fiction: How Norman Mailer Taught Me to Defend My Plots
Anthony Giardina's Literary Hub essay revisiting Advertisements for Myself — especially the 'Last Draft of The Deer Park' section — as a meditation on literary ambition and the diminished cultural stakes of the novel. An about-Mailer clipping.
Read an excerpt (rights pending)
Anthony Giardina. “Fighting for One’s Fiction: How Norman Mailer Taught Me to Defend My Plots.” Literary Hub, 2 April 2025. https://lithub.com/fighting-for-ones-fiction-how-norman-mailer-taught-me-to-defend-my-plots/
Occasioned by the publication of his own sixth novel, Giardina returns to Advertisements for Myself (1959) and especially its “Fourth Advertisement for Myself: The Last Draft of The Deer Park,” Mailer’s account of the rejection and rewriting of The Deer Park. He reads Mailer’s “fighterly” vulnerability — the dread of “taking a beating” from a venerable bank of critics — as a record of a vanished world in which the novel, and the novelist’s public judgment, still mattered, and wonders whether novelists’ own retreat into “chamber music” explains their cultural diminishment. The full text is held in the working archive (rights not yet cleared); see Fighting for One's Fiction: How Norman Mailer Taught Me to Defend My Plots under texts.