Attachment, Abandonment, and Reconciliation

A Psychoanalytic Review of Susan Mailer’s Memoir as Bildungsroman

Abstract

Erik Nakjavani reviews In Another Place: With and Without My Father, Norman Mailer by Susan Mailer (Northampton House Press, 2019). Reading the memoir psychoanalytically as a Bildungsroman, Nakjavani starts from its opening image of a memory lodged in the belly and from two early snapshots, one with her grandmother Fanny and one with her mother, that set up the book’s tension between attachment and abandonment. He argues that Susan Mailer turns the distress of repeated separations into self-knowledge and reconciliation, finding in language and imagination, as her father did, a means of salvation.