Prism Break

Abstract

In her keynote address to the 2019 Norman Mailer Society conference at Wilkes University, the artist Maggie Mailer reflects on the many ways she has met her father—as a six-year-old after he left the family, at their one-on-one dinners, in the hospital before his death, in an ayahuasca vision, and in his writing—and on the gap between the private father and the public, third-person “Norman Mailer.” In a second part she presents diagrams and paintings that map Mailer’s nine children and six wives onto cosmic and scientific forms, and she closes with the tribute she read at his Carnegie Hall memorial.