Barbara Wasserman, remembrance
Reflections: Norman Mailer at 100, ed. Gerald R. Lucas and Maggie McKinley (The Norman Mailer Society, 2023), p. 96; transcribed from the final interior PDF
From Reflections: Norman Mailer at 100 (The Norman Mailer Society, 2023), p. 96.
All through our teenage years Norman was educating me in ways that no one else did. He would surprise me with a thought or a pronouncement that was unlike anything I had heard before, and suddenly the world would look a little different. I still have a vivid memory of a day when the two of us were in the High Street subway station in Brooklyn, waiting on the platform for the A train to Manhattan. We were discussing writing and Norman said he had a problem. He said, “I still don’t know how people change.”
I was startled. That he felt a lack in himself was surprising enough. What truly amazed me was that he recognized it as a problem, since it had never before occurred to me that people change. Indeed I had always assumed that one was what one was, and stayed that way. Now, suddenly, because he had said it, I realized that people change. Still, at the age of 16, it did not occur to me then that both of us, he and I, too, would change.
Barbara Wasserman