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{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}
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{{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. }}
{{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/mr01was}}


 
{{dc|dc=A|bout twenty-five years ago at a dinner party,}} I was asked by the man sitting next to me, “What was it like growing up as Norman Mailer’s sister?”
{{Byline|last=Wasserman|first=Barbara Mailer}}
 
About twenty-five years ago at a dinner party, I was asked by the man sitting next to me, “What was it like growing up as Norman Mailer’s sister?”


If I had ever been asked this before, I had not considered it answerable. It was the kind of question that at best seemed desperate and at worst an invasion of privacy. My answers, if any, were probably flippant and dismissive. At this particular juncture of my life, however, I had heard enough tales from other women of how badly their brothers had treated them to have realized how lucky I had been to have Norman for my brother. For once I was delighted by the question. “It was wonderful,” I said. As an instance, I talked about how, when I was an early adolescent and awkward and unsure of myself, he kept telling me how attractive and intelligent I was. My dinner partner looked dismayed and said ruefully, “Oh I didn’t do that for my sister.” It was clear he wished he had, which sharpened my sense of how lucky I had been.
If I had ever been asked this before, I had not considered it answerable. It was the kind of question that at best seemed desperate and at worst an invasion of privacy. My answers, if any, were probably flippant and dismissive. At this particular juncture of my life, however, I had heard enough tales from other women of how badly their brothers had treated them to have realized how lucky I had been to have Norman for my brother. For once I was delighted by the question. “It was wonderful,” I said. As an instance, I talked about how, when I was an early adolescent and awkward and unsure of myself, he kept telling me how attractive and intelligent I was. My dinner partner looked dismayed and said ruefully, “Oh I didn’t do that for my sister.” It was clear he wished he had, which sharpened my sense of how lucky I had been.
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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.
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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===Note===
{{Notes|title=note}}
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Growing Up with Norman}}
[[Category:Mailer Review]]
[[Category:V.1 2007]]
[[Category:Memoirs (MR)]]
[[Category:Memoirs (MR)]]