An interview with Mike discussing Mailer’s Last Days is featured on the January 31, 2023 episode of Deep Cover with host Damen Dynan. Listen on Apple Music.
Category: Memoir
Published in time for Mailer’s birthday, Ronald Fried has interviewed J. Michael Lennon about his latest memoir Mailer’s Last Days: New and Selected Remembrances of a Life in Literature, Lennon’s relationship with Mailer, and American literature in general. Fried writes:
At the age of 80, Lennon has lived long enough to see how writers’ reputations change over the decades. Since his death in 2007, Mailer’s reputation is still undergoing a transformation. To writers of my generation, Mailer was like a member of the family, in the good and the bad sense: omnipresent, sometimes disappointing, sometimes appalling, often brilliant, always calling attention to himself, and impossible to ignore. But to many younger literary types, Mailer is close to anathema, for his trafficking in misogynistic and racial stereotypes and the near-fatal stabbing of his wife Adele Morales, among other reasons. I talked with Lennon about his relationship with Mailer, Mailer’s contemporaries, and the challenges he faced as an academic and critic writing a highly personal memoir.
Coming Soon from Etruscan Press.
A Conversation with Unexpected Turns
Two longstanding faculty members come together for publication. J. Michael Lennon, co-founder of our creative writing program, archivist, biographer and master of non-fiction, paired with Robert Mooney, wordsmith connoisseur, fiction genius and creator of time-shifting worlds? It feels improbable.
But in the fall of 2022, we shall all bear witness to this brilliant duo’s efforts as Etruscan Press releases Lennon’s book, edited by Mooney. And from the Zoom conversations we’ve had, it sounds like our two mentors will not disappoint.