Love of My Life
By: Barbara Mailer Wasserman
Her brother, author Norman Mailer, became one of the 20th Century's most celebrated and controversial literary figures. Now 94-year-old Barbara Mailer Wasserman shows that she's got writing chops of her own. Whether taking delightful revenge as a kind of proto-Carrie Bradshaw on a rude, real-life Randolph Churchill, or joining the Spanish resistance to smuggle fascist dictator Francisco Franco’s political prisoners across the French border, or nonchalantly greeting the news that her brother’s novel, The Naked and the Dead, has overnight leapt to the top of bestseller lists, Wasserman is openhearted, touching, whimsical, self-revealing and always acutely conscious of her good fortune.
Praise
Love of My Life is a nonstop treat, a tender, funny, bravely optimistic reminder of how good it feels to feel good about being alive in the one life we do choose.”
–David Michaelis, author of Eleanor
“This is a refreshingly honest memoir. In crisp and conversational prose, Wasserman offers intimate and evocative snapshots of her life, examining past loves, ambitions, and adventures with humor and humility. Hers is not merely a catalog of memories but a meditation on how we remember, how we reconcile our past and present selves, and how we shape meaning in our lives.”
–Maggie McKinley, author Masculinity and Paradox of Violence in American Fiction, 1950-75
“Reading Barbara Mailer Wasserman’s memoir is like riding a train back in time in the company of a tender, wise and witty storyteller. Intimate as they are, the stories evoke a bigger picture of a world at war and in the grip of its aftermath, a time when cocktail parties were exhilarating, lives were reinvented, and love was an emergency. One is left eager for more.”
–Susie Seligson, author of Going with the Grain
“Barbara Mailer Wasserman has led a life full of love and adventure, from post-World War Two Spain to the upper tiers of literary New York. We can count ourselves lucky that she has shared it all with us in this very engaging memoir.”
–Tom Piazza, author of A Free State