It is with profound sadness that we announce the passing of Norris Church Mailer, widow of Norman Mailer, who died November 21, 2010, after a long and valiant struggle with cancer. Norris was many things to many people. She was an unusually gifted and talented writer, an insightful observer of the human condition, both as novelist and memoirist. She was an acclaimed professional painter and illustrator, as well as a teacher in her native Arkansas and then a beautiful fashion model in New York. She was the pilgrim soul who captured and won Norman’s heart and mind and who shared with him the last three decades of his life. She was a loving mother and adored stepmother, the glue that held together the eclectic Mailer clan. And she was a good, passionate and generous friend for so many of us who came to know, admire and love her.
I know I speak for everyone in the Norman Mailer society in saying that our hearts go out to all of her family and friends for this irreplaceable loss. We will always carry with us her grace, courage, humor and love.
Mark Olshaker,
President, The Norman Mailer Society
Her Life
She was born Barbara Jean Davis on January 31, 1949, and grew up in Atkins, Arkansas. By 1975 she was teaching high-school art in Russellville, raising her son Matthew, and had a hundred pages of a novel in a drawer. That March, Mailer’s old army friend Fig Gwaltney introduced them at a party in Arkansas. By December she and Matthew were living with Mailer in Brooklyn, and their son, John Buffalo, was born in 1978. They married in New York in 1980. She made a name from her own life—“Norris” from her first marriage, “Church” on Mailer’s suggestion, for her devout upbringing—and kept it as a model, a painter, and a writer.
She painted throughout her life and showed her work across the country; it is her portrait of Henry Miller on the jacket of Mailer’s Genius and Lust (1976). She studied at the Actors Studio, acted and wrote plays, and became artistic director of the Provincetown Repertory Theater. The novel from her Russellville years became Windchill Summer (2000), followed by Cheap Diamonds (2007) and, in the last year of her life, the memoir A Ticket to the Circus (2010), which O, the Oprah Magazine named one of the year’s ten terrific reads.
In her later years she sat on the board of the Norman Mailer Society and co-founded the Norman Mailer Center and Writers Colony. She died at home in Brooklyn Heights on November 21, 2010, with her sons at her bedside. In 2012 John Buffalo Mailer shared a video of her memorial, its speeches woven with film of her life.
The family’s announcement has more.
In Works and Days
- Norris Church Mailer — her meeting with Mailer in 1975, her paintings, and her books.
- Fig Gwaltney, who introduced them
- Genius and Lust (1976), with her portrait of Henry Miller
- John Buffalo Mailer and Matthew Mailer