Mailer’s talk, a stop in the publicity campaign for his latest novel, The Gospel According to the Son, was at a school on the Upper East Side. The typical Mailer loyalist out in the audience looked as if he’d died about ten years before. The novel: the “autobiography” of Jesus. Mailer as God. The jokes just wrote themselves, folks. Onstage, Mailer, who had a weirdly affected Brahmin (was it?) accent, held forth about God, Jesus, Christians, and Christianity as if he alone had the special wisdom monopoly on these topics—and all others. It seemed to me even then dangerous for a writer to come to regard himself as grandee; the writer’s concern should always be getting to the truth—and how can you get to the truth of the story if you are the story, not the one standing outside of it? (In his irritatingly excellent book The Spooky Art, Mailer in fact acknowledges his early fame as the central tragedy of his career.) Never get too comfortable in the temple: this was another message in a bottle I’d send my future self.