A Ticket to the Circus: A Memoir
Norman Mailer's sixth and last wife holds her own in this lively memoir. In 1975, Norris (Cheap Diamonds ) was a 26-year-old divorced mother and hippie art teacher from Arkansas when the 52-year-old novelist swept her off her feet. Though aged and mellowed, he is still a handful: he throws a drink in Gore Vidal's face, gets busted with marijuana, hangs with Fidel Castro and the Ramones, and womanizes compulsively. Norris has retaliatory affairs and a past that includes trysts with a young Bill Clinton. Amid the Mailer juggernaut and the ex-wives, old girlfriends and seven stepchildren, Norris asserts her independence by dabbling in modeling, acting, and fiction, by matching her spouse in repartee, and by “hitting him and scratching him.” One gets a vivid sense of the couple's mutual attraction—she reprints bawdy love letters at embarrassing length—and prickly antagonisms; Norman is a warm, vital, bombastic literary lion, Norris the spunky belle determined to tame him. The author looks beyond her marital melodrama in well-wrought scenes that include a scary portrait of Jack Henry Abbott, the violent convict-writer Norman befriended, and an evocative travelogue in postcommunist Russia. This is a smart, intimate portrait of the glitterati and their discontents. 69 b&w photos. (Apr. 6)
