I read a profile of, or interview with, Norman Mailer
in M magazine by Carole Mallory. I didn’t know she had been
his mistress and he was her mentor. I thought the interview
was all softballs and wrote a pamphlet I called
by analogy with Mailer’s Marilyn. I sent a copy to him,
care of his attorney, Charles Rembar. It got to him.
Thank god for smart secretaries. Mailer wrote me back,
“I have a hunch your stuff is wild and terrific and keeps going off
the rails. I have no better explanation for why you don't find publishers,
since you certainly write well enough sentence for sentence and paragraph
for paragraph.” I’d rather be off the rails than the cow-catcher on a train.
After Mailer died Mallory sold her correspondence with him to Harvard.