VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a reading?
ULIN: I once met Norman Mailer in the early 1990s, during a publication party at the New York Athletic Club. I can’t remember any longer who the party was for, only that Mailer was throwing it, and that when I arrived, he was holding court at the bar, a flushed grin on his face, looking every inch the host. Knowing almost no one in the room, I kept largely to the corners, avoiding Mailer altogether, and settling only at the appearance of a familiar face. Still, I couldn’t help looking towards Mailer periodically, and at one point in the evening, I happened to catch his eye. For a moment, the two of us watched each other, until I turned away. I hadn’t taken more than a step or two, though, when I felt a tap on my shoulder, and there was Mailer, hand extended, having come over to introduce himself. The story, I believe, captures everything one needs to know about Norman Mailer, casting the two essential, contradictory threads of his personality — the ego and the insecurity — into sharp relief.
DAVID L. ULIN is the author, most recently, of Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles. His other books include The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time and the Library of America’s Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he is book critic of the Los Angeles Times.
Come see David read at Book Show in Highland Park on Friday, October 30 at 7:30pm.
Photo by Noah Ulin.