I couldn’t help but notice that the New York Times obituary this past week for Norris Church Mailer, widow of Norman Mailer, failed to mention the occasion that first brought their love affair to public attention. If the institutional memory of the Times has failed in this instance—which I doubt, since the obit is full of charming anecdotes about Ms. Church Mailer—it is worth resurrecting the story.

In the late 1970s, a convicted Utah murderer and bank robber named Jack Henry Abbott wrote to Norman Mailer to complain that Mailer’s writings about Gary Gilmore—another Utah murderer executed in 1977, and the subject of Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song (1980)—were based on Gilmore’s exaggerated accounts of prison life. Abbott offered to write a more truthful memoir, and Mailer encouraged him. Indeed, Mailer grew so impressed by Abbott that he, and other Manhattan luminaries such as Jerzy (Being There) Kosinski, lobbied state officials in Utah to grant Abbott an early parole. In due course, Abbott was released from prison simultaneously with the publication of his memoir, In the Belly of the Beast: Letters From Prison (1981) by Random House.