The Last Wire

How Barbara Jean Davis,a former pickle-factory worker,became Norris Church Mailer,a Wilhelmina model,a novelist,a painter,an actress and a ringmaster extraordinaire,is the subject of her new memoir,titled,aptly enough,A Ticket to the Circus. She managed to stay with Mailerself-obsessed,self-aggrandising,perennially womanisingfor almost 33 years until his death in 2007. When people asked,Which wife are you?,her answer was,The last one.

At 61,Norris is as emaciated as she is beautiful,with auburn hair the same shade as her eyes and gypsyish jewellery. Ten years ago,when she was 51,she was diagnosed with a gastrointestinal stromal tumour. She was given two years to live. Since then she has published two novels and written her memoir while undergoing six major operations and nursing her failing husband. She has had 40 per cent of her small intestine removed because of radiation damage and has had to wear both a colostomy bag and a nephrostomy bag.

I always said I wasnt going to write about Norman because no one would believe it, she said. But when you go to bed after youve lost your husband,you start thinking about the life together,and it just poured out. It felt good because I got to relive all the happy early stuff and I got to wade through all the bad stuff and sort it out in my head.

Married at the age of 20 to her high-school sweetheart Larry Norris,and divorced at 25,she relished her single life in Arkansas,painting,throwing pots,writing. She even had a fling with an unmarried Bill Clinton. Then she fell in love with Mailers Marilyn,and with him. When she moved to New York,she decided to use Norris as a first name. Mailer suggested Church as a surname because,growing up,she attended one three times a week. After they married in 1980,she added Mailer. She gave birth to their son,John Buffalo,in 1978 and spent much of her time on the family.

Still,Norris managed to workshe modelled,did commissioned portraits,acted and wrote plays. She showed Mailer 100 pages of a novel she wrote before they met. His verdict: Its not as bad as I thought it would be. She put it away for 20 years. That novel kept rattling around in my head. It was the grandma of Windchill Summer, she said. That would be her first novel,published in 2000; Cheap Diamonds was published in 2007.

Norris said that in their first eight years together,Mailer remained faithfulmore or less. By the time John Buffalo was 14,she discovered that Mailer had been cheating on her with a small army of women. When she told him she was leaving,in the early 90s,he persuaded her to stay. Im glad I did, she said,so that the kids had a family. By the time I came along,they were shattered. He had broken up with each of their mothers before any child was older than seven.

Over the years there were financial worries tooalimonies,plus private school and college tuition for nine children. The good outweighed the bad,and we loved those kids. I didnt want to leave them,and I didnt want to leave him because he was so interesting. If I had,I would have always wondered what he was up to. But when you lose trust in somebody,you never get it back. Which didnt mean that we didnt have another kind of relationship. The sex was always great. That was the glue that held all this mess together, she said.

John Buffalo Mailer,31,is a writer,an actor and a producer; he appears in the forthcoming film Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. People are their best selves and worst selves intermittently, he said,and the best marriages navigate that ride over the hurt,which I believe they did right to the end. They both had options,and at the end of the day the life they created together won out over infidelity,illness and hard times. She really held her own with my father. They were an amazing team.