PAUL THOMAS LOCKDOWN in NEW ZEALAND Q & A
Which historical writer would you find it difficult to be self-isolating with and why?
This is a tough one but I can’t go past Norman Mailer. In an Observer piece from the early 1980s, reproduced in his collection The Moronic Inferno, Martin Amis wrote that “for some reason or other, Mailer spent the years between 1950 and 1980 in a tireless quest for a fistfight.” Amis described a 700-page oral biography of Mailer as “strewn with vicious confrontations, drunken couplings, ostentatious suicide bids, cruel human manipulations, incessant violence – and incessant cant.” After a few days of that, I think I’d take my chances with COVID-19.
