Maggie McKinley, remembrance
Reflections: Norman Mailer at 100, ed. Gerald R. Lucas and Maggie McKinley (The Norman Mailer Society, 2023), p. 74; transcribed from the final interior PDF
From Reflections: Norman Mailer at 100 (The Norman Mailer Society, 2023), p. 74.
I never had the opportunity to meet Norman Mailer. I didn’t begin to closely examine his work until he was nearing the end of his life, and by the time I was truly invested, he had already passed away. To be quite honest, while I chose to focus on Mailer as part of my dissertation, I never expected to be so involved in the study of his legacy. I assumed he’d be a part of my scholarly life, perhaps in a more peripheral way, but once I went down the rabbit hole, I realized just how much there was to explore. I’m grateful for this unanticipated trajectory of my career, because Mailer has also taught me more than I would have expected. I don’t just mean that his work has illuminated for me certain dimensions of American history and politics (though it has) or that it has reflected to me the possibilities available to the ambitious writer (though it has done that too). What I value most of the many things I have gained from an immersion in Mailer’s work is patience. Some might find this ironic, considering Mailer’s reputation — but public antics aside, Mailer was a careful scholar and a conscientious researcher. In turn, his complicated and unique ideas require patience from his readers, and I quickly learned that if I wanted to know what Mailer was about and what he offered to us, I would have to take my time with him. In subtler ways, confronting Mailer’s complicated history has also encouraged me to be patient not just in my work but in my life, both in my interpersonal relationships and in my more removed observations of players on our cultural stage. Mailer was far from perfect, and he knew it, and in his writing I regularly find humility, lessons in the value of recognizing the complex messiness of people, and a willingness to hear and take seriously the many often irresolvable sides of any situation, any life, any story.
Maggie McKinley