Review Tuesday: In Another Place by Susan Mailer - #memoir #ReviewTuesday #NormanMailer

In Another Place: With and without my father Norman Mailer by Susan Mailer

Northampton House Press, 2019

I don’t usually read memoirs—in particular, the sensational and exploitative memoirs often penned by the children of celebrities. However, In Another Place was highly recommended by a close friend. Meanwhile, I’ve always found Norman Mailer intriguing. Brilliant author, legendary bad boy, respected intellectual and feminist whipping post, his influence still looms large over twentieth century culture. I will admit to being curious to see him through the eyes of his eldest daughter.

Susan Mailer’s memoir could hardly be further from those whining exposés I try to avoid. Rather, it is a delicately balanced, emotionally subtle account of the author’s complicated relationship with a father who clearly loved her but was not always successful in expressing this love, either in words or in deeds. The author avoids hysterics and hyperbole. Her account is dignified and restrained, even when she’s recounting severely traumatic events. Nevertheless, one closes the book with a strong sense of both Susan herself and her paradoxical parent. Her measured treatment does not mute the memoir’s powerful impact.

I suspect that this was difficult book to write. The awkward title encapsulates the problem. Ms. Mailer spent her childhood and teen years shuttling between two countries and two cultures: vibrant, sociable Mexico, where her mother lived and practiced medicine, and trendy, competitive New York, her father’s domain. Wherever she was, she felt the pull of her other life. Of course, children of divorced patterns often experience this sort of conflict. In her case, geographic distance and her father’s fame exacerbated the pain of the split. Hence the memoir’s subtitle. Including the name “Norman Mailer” is more than just a ploy to sell books. As the child of an acknowledged literary genius, Ms. Mailer felt special pressure to impress her father with her intelligence, her talent and her “guts”. At the same time, she was trying to find her way as an individual, to build a life in which she was more than just “Norman Mailer’s daughter”.

It took great courage for the author to revisit her psychologically turbulent early years as she does in this volume.

The book also explores the destructive effects of fame on private life and personal relationships. Norman Mailer, it appears, sometimes believed in his own myth. Propelled into the limelight before he was thirty by his best-selling debut novel The Naked and the Dead, he faced the problem of topping his own personal best. Ms. Mailer does not shy away from portraying his egotism as well as his insecurity. At the same time, she shows how sincere he could be, how charming, loving and generous, as well as diligent, almost driven, when it came to his writing.

In Another Place follows a linear trajectory in time, starting just before Susan’s birth and stretching to her father’s death in 2007. The book includes many of the well-known (and sometimes infamous) incidents in Mailer’s life: his stabbing of his second wife; his run for Mayor of New York; the ad-lib weekend making the experimental film “Maidstone”, including his violent brawl with co-star Rip Torn; the infamous Town Hall- “A Dialogue on Women’s Liberation” - where Mailer moderated, and baited, a panel of renowned feminists. However, Ms. Mailer also chronicles other, more private moments with her father: ski weekends in Vermont, bullfights in Mexico, late night conversations, angry tantrums, and memorably, fun- and love-filled visits at the “Big House” in Provincetown, where Norman Mailer played benevolent patriarch to his nine children and their offspring. The portrait that emerges is fascinating, nuanced and multi-faceted, enlightened by the author’s professional knowledge as a practicing psychoanalyst as well as by the insights and perspective that come with age.

The description above might suggest that this is a book about Norman Mailer, but in fact Susan herself is at the center of the tale. The memoir is an effort to put her own life in perspective, using the mirror of her relationship, to reconcile the fact that she will always be Norman Mailer’s daughter with the recognition that she is much more.

I have not said much about the writing. Ms. Mailer’s prose is crisp, concise and evocative. The structure of the book balances drama with history in a pleasing alternation. The author’s reminiscences do not shy away from negative emotion but are never self-indulgent.

In short, I was deeply impressed by this brave, honest, skillfully crafted work. Even if you’re generally not a fan of memoirs, I recommend it.

Review Tuesday: Ekaterina and the Night by Maxim Jakubowski

Ekaterina and the Night By Maxim Jakubowski
Xcite Books Ltd. 2011

“Will you tell other women stories about me when we are over?” she asked Alexander.

He wanted to be truthful and say no, but already she knew him too well. He was who he was, and aware that the temptation would be too strong not to talk about her, to improvise tales of beauty and fury, of lust and longing, songs of adoration and missing.

This self-referential quotation encapsulates Maxim Jakubowski's latest novel – a book of tales about women, lust, love, and loss. Although ostensibly focused on the relationship between Alexander, an introspective British author, and Ekaterina, a wild-hearted Italian journalist decades his junior, Ekaterina and the Night spends at least half its time tracing these two characters' travels through the lives of other lovers and sex partners, before and after their brief, intense connection.

The novel begins with sixteen year old Ekaterina's decision to seduce her handsome, urbane tennis instructor. She considers that it's high time she discarded her virginity, but she changes her mind when confronted with the grossness of male lust.

The scene shifts to Alexander's early explorations in the world of women. Both sensual and sentimental, Alexander finds astonishing variety in the female body and soul. His heart breaks more than once as he treads the torturous paths of pleasure. Although he recognizes his own susceptibility, he still cannot resist falling for the women he fucks.

Twenty year old Ekaterina meets Alexander when she interviews him for an article. No sparks fly, at least at first. A creature of words as she is, he woos her long distance with missives both tender and obscene. When they next arrange an encounter, in the terminally romantic city of Venice, passion has snared them both.

Even from the beginning, though, both protagonists seem to believe their love is doomed – by geographic and social distance and even more, by the gap of age and experience that separates them. They call themselves Lolita and Humbert, although in fact they have little in common with Nabokov's creations. The fantasy scenario of the innocent and the beast inflames them, inappropriate as is.

Over the course of several years, they meet, infrequently, in fabled cities – Paris, Rome, New York – share a few days of ecstasy, then part. Because they expect their love to fail, it finally does. Ekaterina cuts Alexander out of her life completely. Alexander, who craves women like an addict craves drugs, moves on to other conquests. Time marches forward – but decades cannot completely erase the marks the two have left on each other's souls.

Ekaterina and the Night offers a third major character in Emma, the personification of the night referenced in the title. Emma is a harvester of souls, a sort of emissary or assistant to the angel of Death. Several chapters follow her as she arranges the demise of individuals she has been assigned to harvest, some of whom are minor players in the lives of Alexander or Ekaterina. Emma is extraordinarily beautiful and strangely compassionate despite her role in the universe. As the novel progresses (if one can use that term for a book that jumps back and forth in time the way this one does), Emma's trajectory has near misses with those of the other two protagonists, until finally she arrives for her appointment with the aging Alexander.

I found myself surprised at the book's rather sudden conclusion. I read it in ebook form; one characteristic of ebooks is that it's not always obvious when you're nearing the end. Based on the blurb, I expected a three-way encounter among Emma, Ekaterina and Alexander. That never happened. Instead, Ekaterina fades out of the book completely, despite her prominence in the title.

In fact, I should warn readers to ignore the blurb and the cover (a shapely, boot-clad foot with a steel cuff around the ankle), as both are totally misleading. There's no BDSM to speak of in this novel, and there's nothing particularly shocking about Alexander's and Ekaterina's relationship, as claimed by the blurb. I blame the publisher for this; I suspect people who purchase the novel based on the marketing information will be annoyed when they discover how different the reality is from the hype.

Maxim Jakubowski's style offers a refreshing change from more commercial erotic fiction. His prose is simultaneously dispassionate and full of sensory richness. One has the impression of looking through glass, imagining the smells, sounds and tastes rather than directly experiencing them. Indeed, I think the author is gazing through the lens of recollection, evoking cherished scenes from the past and filling in the details from oft-rehearsed memory – telling his favorite stories, as Ekaterina intuited that Alexander would.

As in previous books, Mr. Jakubowski lovingly describes the geographies in which his characters come together. Indeed, cities, cafés, and hotels are practically minor characters, each one distinct with its own individual personality. Occasionally I found his metaphors jarring (such as a comparison of a woman's nipple to a pizza crust), but overall his literate, observant prose is a pleasure to read.

And is Ekaterina and the Night erotic? Arousing? Yes, and no. The novel includes a great deal of sex – some tender, some raw, some brutal, some boring. The encounters range from transcendent to banal. After Alexander and Ekaterina break up, for example, she falls on hard times economically. To support herself and her lover, she works providing remote sex shows by web cam. There's a long scene in which, on camera and in return for a large amount of money, she allows herself to be taken anally for the first time. There's no pleasure or joy in this scene at all. Other chapters offer accounts of similarly disastrous, uncomfortable, or unpleasant sexual activity. These sections of the book detract from the delicious eroticism one finds elsewhere in the book.

Do not misunderstand me – this is not incompetence. I don't believe that the author intended these scenes to be arousing. Since they do not contribute much (in my opinion) to either the plot or the character development, I'm really not sure why he included them.

And did I enjoy the book? Again, I feel ambivalent. At its best, Ekaterina and the Night is a melancholy, nostalgic evocation of lost love and vanished youth, a meditation on the transforming power of sex and the connection between romance and death. At its worst, it is a set of barely connected vignettes that sometimes arouse and sometimes disgust the reader, but all too often seem rather pointless.

A reader who's looking for a traditional plot, with a core conflict, rise in tension, climax and a resolution, should probably avoid this novel. Someone seeking a more subtle emotional and intellectual experience may well enjoy it. Ekaterina and the Night isn't really a story. It's stories, plural, braided together and united by a wistful sense of remembered joy and a consciousness of mortality.

A Thing of Beauty - #memoir #teenagers #sexystories

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

-- John Keats, Endymion

“Slide your hand across my stomach, baby!”

“Oh, fondle my breasts!”

“I'm hot all over when you touch me...”

The taunts pursued me down the halls of junior high school. There were quieter, more insidious whispers, too, suggestions that I join some boy or another in the back parking lot or under the bleachers. I tried to ignore my tormentors, but for weeks I suffered from a permanent blush. I was paying a heavy price for hormones and imagination.

It all began in study hall, when Bobby intercepted the letter I passed to my friend Nona. It was a draft of an epistle I planned to send to my “pen pal” Glen. I'd never met Glen. He was an older guy Nona knew from her summers at “the lake”, where she had carnal adventures that she hinted about but never really explained. She hooked me up with Glen long distance (this was long before email, of course) and somehow, with his encouragement, we started writing steamy fantasy letters back and forth.

How did I get into this? Honestly, I don't remember. I'm astonished now that I could have been so easily manipulated. But then there were all those hormones...and I wanted Nona to think that I was hip, sexually speaking. Writing to Glen, receiving his notes back, sharing them with Nona, it was all incredibly exciting. It was fun. At least it was until Bobby snatched the folded paper I held out under the desk for my friend to grab.

I realize now that Bobby was probably trying to get my attention, that he probably “liked” me. At the age of thirteen, I was shy, nerdy and really quite clueless about the opposite sex or sex in general, although I thought about boys all the time. Bobby was louder and a lot more confident than I, a smart kid but also a joker. He and I had something of an adversarial relationship in our classes, competing for grades, but I doubt that he really wanted to hurt me with his prank.

It did hurt, though. Overnight I went from being the school egghead to a girl with a “bad reputation”. It didn't matter when I protested that the letter was all imagination. Nobody wanted to believe me.

Normally I'm not the vengeful sort. Nevertheless, I was determined to pay Bobby back for the misery he had inflicted. For days I pondered an appropriate revenge. I wanted to embarrass him, show him that I was smarter than he was, and make him sorry for what he had done.

Finally I hit on what seemed like the ideal strategy. I enlisted the help of my friend Nick. He was one of the only guys who didn't tease me about my dirty little scenarios.

In those days, both boys and girls had to wear uniforms for gym class. Each of us had a locker in the changing rooms where we kept our things. Nick agreed to spy on Bobby to find out the combination for my tormentor's padlock.

Once Nick had obtained this information, I purchased a bottle of cheap perfume at the local Woolworth's. I inscribed the above lines from Keats on classy linen stationery using my most elegant calligraphy and signed the note. On gym day, just before that class, Nick sneaked into the locker room and dumped the whole bottle of scent onto Bobby's gym uniform. He left my message behind so that Bobby would understand who was responsible.

Alas, I didn't get to see the immediate consequences of my stratagem but Nick told me that Bobby's face turned bright red when he opened his locker. The gym teacher forced him to wear his reeking gym clothes for the entire period, much to the amusement of the other guys. A day or two later, Bobby actually came up and apologized for spreading the contents of my letter around. We became friends, though he still enjoyed teasing me. Meanwhile, Nick and I remained close, though our relationship was always platonic. I understand now what a risk he took for me.

I hadn't thought about this experience in a long time, but looking back on this episode from my teenage years I realized that it said a lot about me.

o I've always had a dirty mind. I've been writing sexy stories almost forever—certainly before I had any sexual experience. And you know, it's still exciting.

o I've always used words to get my way.

o Even when I was shy and insecure, I never allowed myself to be a victim.

o Having a bad reputation, ultimately, might not be so bad after all.

I wonder whether Bobby, Nick and Nona recall these events. At the time, the experience was intense and somewhat painful. Now, burnished by memory, I find that it's a thing of beauty.

Review Tuesday: Dark Secret Love by Alison Tyler

Dark Secret Love by Alison Tyler

Pretty Things Press, 2013

“Some men just know.”

Thus begins Alison Tyler's scorchingly honest memoir, appropriately titled “A Story of Submission”. Her prologue continues: “I've been lucky enough to find those men several times in my life.”

Dark Secret Love chronicles Ms. Tyler's journey through relationships with several dominants, as she struggles to accept her own needs for punishment and for pain. She was only eighteen when she met her first Dom – no virgin, but well aware already that “normal” sex didn't really satisfy her. “I didn't need to tell him anything,” she writes. “He saw me and gave me his number scrawled on a paper napkin. Call me, was all it said.”

To be so transparent to a Master – to be recognized for what you are and what you crave – in fact, not only recognized but approved and valued – is a heady experience for a submissive. (I can testify from personal experience.) No ordinary person would have guessed the author harbored the dark and deviant fantasies that consumed her. In her teens and twenties, Ms. Tyler (or maybe I can call her Alison, after the intimate confessions in this book) was smart, witty, self-confident, petite and pretty, responsible and hard working, a good girl in every way. Nobody would have guessed that she wanted to be beaten, used, humiliated, punished – that all her fantasies involved pain, that (in the words forced from her by one of her Doms) “It has to hurt.”

Nobody, that is, except those few men who in fact could give her what she needed. First there was Brock, the motorcycle-riding petty crook ten years her senior:

“I have a photo of him following a night of no sleep. He's wearing black jeans and no shirt under an open blazer and he's smoking a cigarette, but barely, the butt dangling from his lower lip. He has that insolent fuck you look that has always made me wet in a minute.”

Then, after she moved in with her rich, narcissistic, hopelessly vanilla fiancé Byron, there was Connor, young, brash and California blond. Ultimately, her raw, stolen moments with Connor are the reason Byron throws her out on the street, not even allowing her access to her clothing.

Once she's free (or perhaps “set adrift” would be more appropriate), Connor arrives at her door with flowers. And a crop.

Alison's account of her three years with Byron will be enough to convince you that the skeleton of this tale is true. No one would fabricate such a stupid decision as to move in with a guy like him. Still, you can understand her motivations to some extent as a desperate attempt to be normal and socially acceptable. Externally Byron was everything a woman should want. Furthermore, as one of her Doms points out later, she did submit to him, for three years, wearing the clothing he chose, decorating his house the way he liked, suppressing her real self in a (hopeless) attempt to please him.

However, to paraphrase Shakespeare, kink will tell.

Connor leaves for Georgia, to pursue his own dreams. Alison stays behind in LA. (“We didn't have love. We had lust.”) Sleeping on a couch in the group apartment of a friend of a friend, the author gets involved with her two male roommates, Garrett and Nate. Both turn out to be well-practiced dominants, though Alison goes far deeper with Nate. This is one episode that felt fictional to me. Perhaps the ratio of dominants to the general population is significantly higher in Los Angeles than the rest of the world, but honestly, what are the chances both guys you're living with are hot, kinky, and skilled in the dominant arts? As well as kind and supportive?

Of course, maybe the author was more fortunate than most of us.

Finally, Alison encounters Jack, a steel-willed, frightfully powerful, intermittently cruel older man who not only sees what she needs, but forces her to admit it.

“Say it. I want to hear you say it.”

A deep, shaking breath. “This isn't punishment.”

“What isn't?”

Eyes shut tight now. “The fact that you're going to use your belt on me.”

“I'm going to whip you.”

Oh, Jesus, please.

“You're going to whip me,” I repeat obediently. “But it's not a punishment. It's a reward.”

“Why?”

“Because I need it.” I choked on the statement, so difficult to admit, so hard to confess.

Jack brought his mouth close to my cheek then, kissed me fiercely, and when he spoke, his words were so soft I could barely hear them. “Don't worry so much, Sam. I need it, too.”

Jack strips away whatever shreds of normality the author has left. He insists that she be absolutely faithful and obey him without question. He punishes her when she's resistant or disobedient – and when she's not. He's more extreme and more manipulative than I would ever want in a Dom, but somehow he's exactly the Master the author has always dreamed of. Dark Secret Love has a happily ever after (apparently, at least), of a peculiarly difficult sort that only BDSM aficionados will appreciate.

I believe this book. I've read many of Alison's short stories, and I recognized the scenarios from some of my favorites. We erotica authors all mine our pasts for fictional material. Now I understand why those brief tales felt so intense. They're slices of life, in the truest sense.

In addition to relating Alison's voyage of sexual discovery, Dark Secret Love also documents the history of her distinguished career as an author. She has written “forever” but only under Nate's benevolent dictatorship does she manage to actually finish a novel and submit her work. Writing has always been easy for her. She's merely capturing the events and revelations as they occur:

And when we were done, if I wasn't too drained (or if he had decided to undo the straps holding me to his bed), I'd head back to my notebook and write it all down. You want to know how I can still remember different nuances, subtle lighting, scents, changes in the weather, the way the cool metal of his cuffs felt on my skin, the way I felt when I heard other girls' voices on the answering machine? That's simple. I recorded it all. Every important moment.

Later, Jack gives her rare permission to travel to New York on her own, to meet with publishers and editors, a thrilling experience that marks her transition from amateur to professional. Indeed, all her dominants support her literary aspirations. I'm very grateful.

If you're tired of the dozens of stories that whitewash BDSM – tales where the sub has more orgasms than stripes, where the first Master who recognizes her as a “natural submissive” turns out be her soul mate, where her fear disappears with the first mild slap on her bare ass – check out this book. Ms. Tyler makes it clear that being a submissive isn't necessarily easy. It's a process of growth. It may take years to unequivocally accept your own dark fantasies and be willing to live them without embarrassment or regret.

A First Foray in Memoir - Perilous Play: The Real Fifty Shades

By Suz deMello (Guest Blogger)

The cover of Perilous Play states: based on a true story. The fact is, very little in this memoir is fiction.

Places and names have been changed. The time in my life when these events occurred is altered. One scene was added, to wrap up the story and tie it in a tidy bow.

But otherwise, it’s all true.

I had to change names, dates and places because of a commitment I had made to a man I call “Trapper Hart” in the book. He’s quite well-known in his portion of our world, so it took quite a bit of fancy footwork to revise the facts to me truthful enough, but not too truthful.

This was a new experience for me as a writer. Either I’m absolutely truthful, as in a blog about an event, or totally fictitious, like the vast majority of my novels and stories. I don’t generally write many drafts—I edit as I go—but Perilous Play was unusual. I needed about four drafts before I hit on the right formula that would allow me to tell the truth of my experience while keeping my word not to “out” my former Dom.

Here’s what the book is about:

One woman’s journey into the contemporary kink underworld, Perilous Play is Suz deMello’s explosive personal account of her experiences with BDSM. Engaging and honest, this groundbreaking memoir will grab you and never let you go.

Here’s an excerpt of the only fictional event—a ménage with two men I did have relationships with. Alas, never got that ménage experience I’ve craved for so long! But it’s a hot scene and I hope you enjoy it.

I drove to Lafayette feeling hot and ready. I thought I’d be able to persuade Mark to allow me to top him again, which really excited me. That emotion quickly changed to deliciously terrified seconds after I rang his doorbell.

Because Tobias opened the door.

Mark stood behind him, arms folded over his torso. Both looked grim, which surprised me. Wasn’t Mark’s birthday a joyous occasion? Squelching nerves, I entered, handed Mark his gift and hugged him. “Happy birthday, sweetie.”

“Sweetie,” he said, contempt infusing his voice. “Is that right?”

“Well, yeah, honey, of course.” I still had no idea what was going on. Tobias had stated quite firmly when we’d met that he wasn’t interested in a threesome with another man, so why was he here? He certainly didn’t look as though he was in a celebratory mood. Though mystified, I had no course of action other than to wait until the men told me what was up.

I set down my toy bag and handed Mark his gift. Without opening it, he tossed it onto the kitchen counter, reached into his pocket and took out his cell phone. So did Tobias. After brief finger-tapping, they held out the phones so I could read the screens. On each, I saw:

Good morning and Happy Thanksgiving! I hope today is everything you want it to be, sweetie!

I was fucked. Or going to be fucked. “Uh, guys,” I started, backing away and holding out my hands in entreaty. “Uh, I know this looks bad, but—“

Tobias reached around me and shoved the door closed so hard it slammed. His other arm caged me between his solid body and the door.

I wasn’t going anywhere Tobias didn’t want me to go.

I stared into his dark eyes, trying to read his expression, divine his thoughts. The only conclusion that I could reasonably reach is that I had insulted my Dom.

“You know what you’ve done,” he said.

I nodded.

“You know it wasn’t appropriate.” His mouth twitched and I realized he was trying not to grin.

I nodded again, squelching my answering smile, playing the game. Why not? It was fun.

His eyes twinkled. “You’ve been a very, very bad girl.” He ran a finger along my jawline.

Shivering, I closed my eyes, allowing myself to get into role, immerse myself in the scene. Was I safe?

Oh, yes. I’d been with both men before. They knew my limits and were entirely trustworthy.

“Do you accept your punishment?”

Excitement zipped through me as though I’d dared to touch a live Taser. “Yes, sir,” I said sweetly, batting my eyelashes.

I peeked around Tobias. Though our relationship was more equal—in fact, Mark enjoyed me topping him—he didn’t look pleased. He picked up a couple of dark-gray objects that lay on his kitchen counter.

They clanked.

Shackles.

If what you have read intrigues you, here are a couple of buy links:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/509003 (smashwords)

http://tinyurl.com/MemoirDeMello (Amazon)

About me:

Best-selling, award-winning author Suz deMello, a.k.a Sue Swift, has written nineteen books in several genres, including memoir, nonfiction, erotica, comedy, historical, paranormal, mystery and suspense, plus a number of short stories and articles on writing. A freelance editor, she’s held the positions of managing editor and senior editor, working for such firms as Totally Bound and Ai Press. She also takes private clients.

Her books have been favorably reviewed in Publishers Weekly, Kirkus and Booklist, won a contest or two, attained the finals of the RITA and hit several bestseller lists.

A former trial attorney, her passion is world travel. She’s left the US over a dozen times, including lengthy stints working overseas. She’s now writing a vampire tale and planning her next trip.

--Find her books at http://www.suzdemello.com

--For editing services, email her at suzdemello@gmail.com

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--Her current blog is http://www.TheVelvetLair.com