Patrolling No-Man’s Land, Living on the Border

Abstract

Bonnie Culver reviews Susan Mailer’s In Another Place With and Without My Father, Norman Mailer (Northampton House Press), a memoir by Mailer’s eldest child, a psychoanalyst raised largely in Mexico. Culver traces the book’s three parts, which chart the geographic, familial, and cultural separations between daughter and father, from the aftermath of Mailer’s stabbing of Adele Morales through Susan’s college years, Town Bloody Hall, and her later life in Chile. She notes episodes that supplement J. Michael Lennon’s biography and an account of Norris Church Mailer that differs sharply from Norris’s own in A Ticket to the Circus, and she praises the memoir’s unsentimental, unvarnished candor.