Norman Mailer’s wife comes out of the shadows

‘It’s not as bad as I thought it would be,’ said Norman Mailer to his wife, Norris Church, after reading the first chapters of a novel she wrote in the 1970s. It took her decades to recover from this accolade and the book remained unpublished until 2000.

Here’s a two-handed drama she drafted in the 1980s. The setting is a New York strip joint. A social anthropologist finds a girl in a booth and hires her to describe her daily life. He feeds her banknotes through a slot, like a zoo-keeper giving peanuts to a caged marmoset, and she prattles away at him earning a dollar every 60 seconds. She strongly suspects he’s not a scientist but a self-deluding voyeur who disguises his carnal appetites as an intellectual investigation. Happens a lot, she says to him.

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Louise Perry

The Rotherham cover-up

Cut to a new scene. Same city, same actors, same hairdos, different names.