A Ticket To The Circus, By Norris Church Mailer, Hardcover, 432 pages, Random House:

Norris Church Mailer has written the book she used to tell her husband, Norman Mailer, she would never write — the book about him. But A Ticket to the Circus tells Norris Mailer’s story, too. The former Barbara Davis of small-town Arkansas was the granddaughter of a mule skinner; she later became Little Miss Little Rock, a military wife, a mother, a teacher, a model, a painter, a novelist and a grandmother who — her grandchildren may one day be fascinated to learn — once dated Bill Clinton and played footsie with both Teddy Kennedy and fashion designer Oleg Cassini simultaneously.

Although that last bit, Mailer points out, isn’t exactly correct.

“Actually, I didn’t play footsie with Teddy and Oleg, they played footsie with each other,” Mailer says with a laugh. “They thought it was me. … Teddy was on one side and Oleg was on the other, so at a certain point I excused myself to go to the ladies’ room. And they stopped and kind of looked at each other with this funny look on their faces, and then I saw both of them lean down and start fumbling with their shoes. My feet had been tucked under my chair and they had been playing footsie with each other thinking it was me.”

Mailer tells NPR’s Scott Simon that her first meeting with Norman Mailer, who died in 2007, was “one of these coincidences where 10 things have to line up perfectly for this incident to happen, but they all did.”

Mailer belonged to a book-of-the-month club, and she says the first of these many coincidences arrived when she forgot to decline the delivery of a new book called Marilyn. That book, of course, was Norman Mailer’s controversial 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe.

The book was too expensive for her to justify keeping, she says, but she began reading it anyway, and then discovered that Norman Mailer would be visiting a mutual friend named Francis Gwaltney.

“Francis was giving a cocktail party, and I thought, ‘Oh, perfect. I’ll go to the cocktail party, I’ll get my book signed and that’ll be great,’” Norris Mailer says. The cocktail party led to dinner with her future husband.

“That’s kind of when everything started,” she says.

At the time, the stars were not exactly aligned. Norman Mailer was separated from his fourth wife, living with a woman with whom he had a child, and having an affair with another woman. But Norris Mailer says he swept her off her feet.

“He was just the most interesting person I’ve ever met. And you really can’t pick who you’re attracted to, you just are. And somehow it worked out, and I knew it was going to work out.”

Violence Intrudes

Married life was complicated by more than her husband’s romantic appetites. After he wrote The Executioner’s Song, about a convicted murderer on death row, Gary Gilmore, Norman Mailer became an advocate for another violent criminal named Jack Henry Abbott. Abbott’s letters to him from prison became the basis for a book called In the Belly of the Beast, and Mailer used his celebrity to push for Abbott’s parole. Abbott was on the Mailers’ doorstep the night he was released.

“I didn’t know he was getting out of prison until my husband had his coat on walking out the door to pick him up,” Norris Mailer says. Her husband said that he would give Abbott a job as a research assistant, and he promised that if they had him over for dinner, she would never have to see Abbott again.

“So Jack came for dinner that night and actually was kind of moving,” she says. “I got very involved, and of course it all ended badly.”

The night before The New York Times published a rave review of In the Belly of the Beast Abbott stabbed a man to death. It was just six weeks after his release from prison.

Mailer says she thinks her husband believed helping Abbott to become a writer could change his life.

“But you can’t expect someone who has been in prison his whole entire life to turn around and become a sweet guy who writes books and walks his dog and has a normal life,” she says. “It’s just not going to happen that way.”

In the aftermath of the murder, Norman Mailer courted controversy when he was quoted as saying, “Culture is worth a little risk.”

“Norman tended to — when he was under pressure, like with people screaming at him — he would just sort of throw something out there,” Norris Mailer says. “I knew what he was saying. You can’t not ever try to save somebody. You can’t not ever try to help somebody. But you need to weigh it a little more carefully before you act.”

The Old Bull

Despite the intrusion of violence into their lives, the couple lived a happy, almost blissful life with their son and eight children from their earlier marriages (seven of them Norman’s). Until, that is, Norris Mailer, who took care of the family finances, discovered some surprising credit card charges. It is fair to say, she assents, that the old bull had not changed his ways.

“I know people think I’m totally stupid. I mean, I was wife number six, and he had all these girlfriends and was famous for being a philanderer,” Mailer says. “But when I said to him, ‘Why didn’t I know?’ He said, ‘It’s not hard to fool somebody who loves you and trusts you’ — which is a really kind of devastating thing to say, but it was absolutely true.”

“The thing that really made it so believable was that he really did change for a number of years. He wanted to change. He wanted to try monogamy. He’d never done that; he’d always been a philanderer. And he wanted to try living without guilt. He wanted to try living with just one woman to see how deep one could get into a relationship with just one person if you didn’t have others, if you weren’t lying and cheating. And for a number of years, he was really true to me,” she says. “And then you get lulled into thinking, ‘This is going to go on forever.’ And as we know, it didn’t go on forever.”

Why did she stay?

“There’s times you leave somebody for something like this, but it’s not so easy. You don’t leave a person, you leave your whole life. You leave a family. You leave thousands of little habits,” Mailer says. “We had nine children. … We wound up being together almost 33 years and we were, at that point, together about 16 years. I was these kids’ mother. We had a son of our own who was 14 at the time. To leave an entire life to go to what?”

Norman said he was sorry, she says, made it clear that he wanted to change, and that made the difference.

“If he had said to me, ‘You know, sweetheart, I love you but I can’t be true to you because I’m just the way I am and you’ll have to accept it,’ I think I would have left. I couldn’t have lived that way,” Mailer says. “But he made it very clear that he wanted to go back and wanted to be true and was tired of the philandering and wanted me to forgive him. And he was so sincere that I did.”

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“Making Rounds with Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat.” (Hyperion, $23.99).

Oscar is uncanny. He knows when death approaches.

At first this was just a curious observation. Now it’s an undeniable conclusion, first published two years ago in a medical journal and now in a new book coming out Tuesday: “Making Rounds with Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat.” (Hyperion, $23.99).

Oscar is the cat. David Dosa is the author and the doctor. And it would be a mistake to assume from the title that Oscar merely accompanies Dosa at Steere House in Providence, which cares for patients with terminal dementia.

“It’s definitely his world,” Dosa says. “He just lets us work there.”

Oscar lives at the nursing home. And in his roughly five years there, Oscar has sensed the imminent deaths of some 50 patients whom he insisted on sitting beside and keeping company as their lives came to a close.

“It’s not like he dawdles,” Dosa writes. “He’ll slip out for two minutes, grab some kibble, and then he’s back at the patient’s side. It’s like he’s literally on a vigil.”

Dosa is an assistant professor of medicine at Brown University. He has faith in science, not in a cat. Well, that was once the case. Dosa’s faith has been shaken.

“My own intellectual vanity made it easier for me to reject the notion that some errant feline could know more than we as medical staff did,” Dosa writes. “I felt strangely elated by the notion that I could be completely wrong.”

A few years ago Dosa realized he was completely wrong. Two patients on opposite sides of the nursing home were dying. A female staff member who earlier noticed Oscar’s aptitude to sense the onset of death took Oscar out of one patient’s room and brought him to the room of the other patient who was regarded as more deathly ill.

“She brought in this angry cat and put him on the bed,” Dosa says. “Oscar charged out of the room and immediately ran back to the other room. Oscar was right. That patient died that evening. The patient we thought would die first lived a couple of more days.”

Dosa could no longer deny Oscar’s ability. So Dosa didn’t. Instead, he told everyone. He wrote an article about Oscar that appeared in July 2007 in the New England Journal of Medicine. And suddenly, Oscar was national news.

Everyone knew about Oscar, certainly families using the services of Steere House.

“People would say, ‘Have you heard what this cat does?’ ” Dosa says. “Now there is this added sense of, ‘My God, Oscar is in the room. You know what that means.’ Families have taken it for what it’s worth, perhaps comfort for a loved one, but haven’t taken it overboard.”

Dosa is a geriatrician, not a veterinarian. However, he has had plenty of interaction with cats: Steere House has five besides Oscar.

“None of them do anything like this,” Dosa says. Their most interesting behavior is by one cat that likes to sleep on the bench of the lobby’s player piano.

“It makes it appear as though he’s playing,” Dosa says.

That’s nothing compared with Oscar appearing on the bed of a dying patient several hours before the patient dies.

Why Oscar does this is a matter for speculation. Dosa’s best theory has to do with ketones. They’re biochemicals with a distinct smell that is created when the body’s cells begin to degenerate, easily detectable by a cat with its keen sense of smell. But why is Oscar — and only Oscar — attracted to it?

“Obviously we’d love to be able to say that he’s helping the dying,” Dosa says. “That’s something we all hope for. We all have a fear of dying and the idea of a cat sitting with us and praying with us into the next life is something we all want. We’ve gotten a number of letters from people saying just that.”

Maybe Oscar likes the smell of ketones. But, Dosa say, Oscar also likes the nursing home residents.

“This is essentially his whole world,” Dosa says. “He has 40 family members on the floor. He wants to be with them when they’re in need.”

The need, apparently, is only at the end of their lives. Oscar is not that social a cat.

“This is not a cat that likes me,” Dosa says. “The first time he met me, he bit me.”

Oscar’s unsociable nature makes his death’s-door visits even more remarkable.

“You find him under a bed or behind a medicine cart. Like any cat you could probably bribe him if you wanted to see him.”

There’s some question whether the patients, all suffering from dementia, know Oscar is sitting with them. “I don’t know that they would know if a cat jumped on their bed,” Dosa says.

On the other hand, Dosa has seen surprising responses.

“Even with patients with terminal dementia, things get through. Patients who can’t hold a conversation or walk will light up when they see a baby on the floor. Music is another.”

Oscar may be a harbinger of death, Dosa says, but he’s also comfort to the living — especially family members. “They find comfort in having Oscar there,” Dosa say. As much time as family members may spend with a patient, Dosa says, it never seems enough. “It’s easier to leave knowing there is a cat sitting there.”

One clear benefit to Oscar’s presence is the notification of kin.

“Families always ask, ‘Should I fly my daughter out from California?’ It’s a very difficult question.”

Oscar makes the answer easy. Sometimes a dying person can hold on far longer than doctors expect. However, when Oscar visits a patient, the staff knows the patient hasn’t long to live. “Oscar has allowed us to be a little more responsive and to call family members.”

And family members appreciate that. A few of the obituaries of Steere House residents have mentioned that the person died in the company of their family and “Oscar the cat.”

“The cat has something to teach us,” Dosa says. “Death is a difficult time and Oscar being there at the end of life serves as a model for all of us. People see what they want to see in Oscar. But they definitely do seem to take some benefit from him and what he does. That in itself is amazing doctoring.”