The article in the March issue of Vanity Fair about the late Norman Mailer reminds me of how I used to see him out walking in Provincetown, where he lived in Cape Cod. He would not have remembered how once, following a reading at a progressive synagogue that met in my friend’s parent’s home in the Chicago suburbs, he settled on the couch next to my 16-year-old self and suggested that what I needed was to run away with an older man. Looking back on it, he was probably right.