Norman Mailer · The Boston Strangler

Norman Mailer would have turned 100 at the end of this month. The 12/26/22 issue of The New Yorker let David Denby get maaaybe a bit carried away at times in his A Critic At Large investigation of Mailer and World War II, but gives good context for Mailer’s toxic-masc rep, and the rehabilitation it’s perhaps set to undergo as his natal anniversary approaches.

Attentive and sweet-natured much of the time—his letters to friends and even to strangers are generously supportive—he also brawled and head-butted at parties. He was decked, hammered, billy-clubbed; his eye was gouged. … His recklessness encompassed an abominable act: at the end of a drunken party, in 1960, he twice stabbed Adele Morales, his second wife and the mother of two of his children.

Mailer is historically, for me, one of those “geniuses I wouldn’t allow to use my bathroom” guys, guys I don’t need anyone to talk to but whom I don’t think we can or should avoid talking about.