In Conversation: On Love of My Life: A Memoir

Barbara Mailer Wasserman has been a researcher on documentary films, an editor at Simon & Schuster, and a sometime writer who has proven that her brother, Norman Mailer, was not the family’s only talented wordsmith. Her publications include The Bold New Women, an anthology of women writers published in 1967 and revised in 1970, and the short memoir Spain, 1948, published in The Hudson Review (Autumn, 2000). In Love of My Life: A Memoir (independently published), Mailer Wasserman shares more of her incredible life. A classical pianist and Radcliffe College graduate who opted to work as a secretary rather than teach, she writes of skewering Randolph Churchill, smuggling fascist dictator Francisco Franco’s political prisoners across the French border in 1948, and hearing the news that her brother’s debut novel, The Naked and the Dead, had leapt to the top of bestseller lists overnight – and remains delightfully openhearted, touching, whimsical, self-revealing and acutely conscious of her good fortune while doing so.

Artist, writer and editor Raymond Elman co-founded Provincetown Arts magazine in 1985 and is the founding editor-in-chief of the Inspicio Arts publication platform. His paintings have been widely exhibited and are included in numerous collections. Beginning in 1989, after decades of making only abstract art, Elman began focusing on portraits of the art colony at leisure. His large-scale, mixed-media portraits of Pulitzer Prize recipients Stanley Kunitz, Jhumpa Lahiri, Alan Dugan, and U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky are in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. His most recent project is a series of mixed media portraits of people (now in their 70s and 80s) who patronized Historic Hampton House during the segregation-era 1950s and ’60s.