92.11a

“Author Mailer Offers His Views on Life.” Article-interview by Denise Pavloski. Citizens’ Voice (Wilkes-Barre, Penn.), 20 November, 1. 37. At a Wilkes University evening event, Mailer read from his October 1992 article in New Republic (92.10) on the Republican Party’s convention. In it, he praises Barbara Bush as the Queen of America, but with a common touch. He then discussed the AIDS issue debated at the convention: “People with HIV have not entered some alienated state of being, they are human.” At the end of the evening, he spoke of the difficulties of novel-writing. “It is very hard to write a truly good novel. It’s one of the most difficult acts known to mankind.” To succeed, he continued, a writer needs two key elements, luck and character. Recalling, no doubt, his devastation when his second novel, Barbary Shore (51.1) was lambasted by reviewers, he said, “Character is terribly important to recover from disappointment.”