Author Norris Church Mailer passed away on Sunday. She was 61-years-old.
Mailer was born Barbara Jean Davis. She wrote a memoir called A Ticket to the Circus and two novels, Windchill Summer and Cheap Diamonds. She was married to the late author Norman Mailer for 27 years.
Random House offered this tribute to her literary life: “In 1975, she was living in Russellville, Arkansas where she was a painter and taught high-school art; she had also written about a hundred pages toward a novel (which she would later reshape into Windchill Summer and publish in 2000). She had read Norman Mailer’s biography of Marilyn Monroe, and in 1975 attended an Arkansas party for him. Subsequently, they dated, had one son whom they named John Buffalo in 1978, and were married in New York city in 1980. She took on her former married name as first name, ‘Norris,’ and took Mailer’s suggestion of ‘Church,’ evoking her intensive religious upbringing, as a surname.”