Norman Mailer And Me

There was a time when I believed – with all my heart – that I could be a writer.

Never a stellar student (working hard has never suited my temperament), I excelled effortlessly in English class. The books we read lit my mind on fire, the words and the stories taking me far from the dreary suburban existence that surrounded me.

Even when I exchanged the suburbs for the city, tales of all sorts roared within my brain, sending my pen flying across the lined paper as I struggled to express my feelings and thoughts about the novels fed to me in my new, private school.

It was at ASL that I first discovered Pat Conroy and William Styron, those modern Southern masters of language and narrative. Sophie’s Choice led me to a bookstore in West Hampstead, where I snatched up copies of Set This House On Fire and The Confessions Of Nat Turner.

The paperbacks purchased that long-ago Saturday in north London now sit in my den in a bookcase that once housed my father’s college textbooks.

My father was an engineer, one whose faith in all things mathematical and mechanical was not to be shaken, even to the time of his death. His last chance at a longer life after a terminal diagnosis of metastatic colon cancer was a drastic surgery.

Not surprisingly, my dad opted for the operation. After all, the body is nothing but a machine, if an altogether mysterious one.

While I believe my father hoped for a child who would follow in his footsteps, he never once tried to stop me from the path of my heart.

He knew the love of words was strong inside me, and no one believed in me more. I remember bringing home the first of what would become a long string of personal essays eventually leading – although it was a circuitous path – to this space called Chicken and Cheese.

The essay was about our last days in London, just after we found out we were moving back stateside. I wrote of what it was like to leave my first love behind, of what it felt like to leave a place that had become home for the stranger frontier of an old one.

My mother described my father’s reaction over the phone when I asked her what they thought of the piece, which earned me an “A” and a comment from my professor praising my “lyricism.”

“It made him sad to know you felt so bad,” my mom said.

Time went on and I earned high, effortless marks in my composition and journalism classes, and mediocre grades in all my required classes.

My junior year was especially fruitful – a broken heart is a great motivator. I joined the student newspaper and composed witty, self-deprecating essays for the opinion page. Once piece about being a non-driver in a country of autophiles earned me high praise from my dad.

“That’s what I like,” he said, after I mailed him the clipping. “I like it when you write funny.”

My professors liked it, too, and they liked my imaginative use of language. What I didn’t tell them, what I feared would cause them to retract the As, was that the work felt like play.

I was flying, gliding on youth and spirit and hopes. An underground magazine cropped up and I was the first one at the door, waiting to write outrageous articles for free, just for the high of seeing my name on the cover.

That Christmas I looked forward to my break, as I always did. My social life in college was as you’d expect – difficult and precarious. I felt like an outsider no matter what the setting, and I adopted an aloof attitude to thwart anyone from getting to close. Close could hurt you.

Every Christmas for as long as I can remember, my siblings and I would find books under the tree. My father the engineer was no stranger to the fair art of storytelling. As well versed in words as numbers, he and I (and my mother, as well) shared a deep love of books.

That Christmas I found Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost tied up with a holiday bow. I opened the cover of the enormous hardcover novel to read this inscription:

Norman is a great author – someday I know some father will write his little girl a note in a book written by another great author – you.

I had yet to understand Mailer’s greatness – I would read The Executioner’s Song later that summer. But my dad read The Naked And The Dead long before I was born and knew I would come to love this egomaniac’s understanding of narrative.

When Mailer died recently, I wandered into the living room and pulled my tattered paperback copy of The Executioner’s Song off the bookshelf. Looking up, I caught sight of Harlot’s Ghost, the bookmark I placed in it all those years ago taunting me.

I never finished the book, you see. It was too dense, too hard, too convoluted for me. I wanted to finish it, and I tried many times to get through it.

But I never did.

The inscription inside surprised me. I’d forgotten about it. But looking at it, seeing my dad’s distinctive handwriting and his faith in me, brought tears of regret and pride.

My father believed I would be a great writer someday, someone whose words would become a siren song to some other young hopeful thing.

But in the end, my writing career veered too far to the left and I abandoned it, much like that never-finished book sitting high up on my shelf.

My father died before I started writing again, before I had the opportunity to justify his faith in me. A childlike desire to believe in fairy tales leads me to think he can see me now, hear me when I talk to him, and that he knows I am flying once again, working hard to find a way back to the girl whose only desire was to tell stories.

I like to imagine him meeting Norman Mailer at the gate, and telling him about his little girl, who is a writer, too.