The Mailer Review/Volume 1, 2007/Growing Up with Norman: Difference between revisions

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{{Byline|last=Wasserman|first=Barbara Mailer|abstract=We sometimes walked around the streets of Brooklyn on cold winter days, carrying our ice skates and trying to find a tennis court that was flooded and frozen over. I remember nothing ever seemed to get frozen except our feet. A couple of years later, when he wanted to learn ballroom dancing, he got a book that diagrammed the fox trot and other dance steps with pictures of the feet, and we practiced together. I learned to dance. I’m afraid he didn’t.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr07wass}}

I’m very glad he did not become famous until I too was an adult. Since he was so influential in giving me a strong sense of self, it took me years after ''The Naked and the Dead'' was published to come to terms with the fact that people could no longer see me as myself alone, and not my brother’s sister.{{efn|With a deferential nod to W. B. Yeats.}} I used my married names to preserve some measure of anonymity. But I came at last to realize that being Norman’s sister is a part of my identity. Whatever its displeasures, it has from the beginning, made my life more interesting, more complex, and more fun.

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[[Category:Memoirs (MR)]]