“I can’t be the father you want me to be. My mind is captured by my ideas and the need to write them down,” New York writer Norman Mailer, one of the 20th century’s essential literary voices, often told his daughter Susan. The eldest of his nine children, she is now a psychoanalyst who has lived in Chile since the 1980s. Susan first began to understand what these words meant in 2014, after her father had been dead for seven years, and decided to write a book about their relationship: In Another Place: With and Without My Father, Norman Mailer. It was a liberating journey. The book is not a predictable settling of accounts with her father, but rather a complex journey of light and shadows, and an intimate portrait of a public man whose book launches were attended by John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Woody Allen and the Kennedys (he was a close friend of Jackie’s). It tells the story of the daughter who tried to live up to it all. The book is even a testimony of deep love, reconciliation, a lack of sense of belonging and a woman between two forces – her mother and her father – who only ends up finding her own identity after her father has died.
Interview in El País
