Isn’t it proper in a biography to consistently refer to the subject by the same name? In this book Dearborn switches back and forth from “Norman” and “Mailer” constantly, which I find to be quite annoying. She also dances around the timeline way too much, often without reason.
Another big frustration I had was her punctuation usage: the sentences don’t carry a good rhythm, some not even making sense on a re-read. And yet she points out one instance of Mailer’s grammar as “odd” (the example wasn’t at all odd to me, in fact it made perfect sense).
The epilogue of the book seems to be random, a place to put everything that didn’t fit elsewhere. In the first few paragraphs of the epilogue it appears Dearborn has switched the tense in which she refers to Mailer. Throughout most of the book the tense goes with the timeline, but here, approaching present time, it could be said she’s speaking of him as if he were dead for a few paragraphs, then switches back to the previous tense used.
Overall, the book does have some interesting information about the life of one of America’s greatest writers. But most of the information could be found elsewhere more easily. This book just doesn’t flow the way I think it should.
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