Maud breaks the news that Norman Mailer will be appearing on an episode of “Gilmore Girls” later this season.

Tingle Alley harbors warm feelings for Mailer as for a summer in the mid 1960s he carried a torch for my mother. (My words, not hers.) They were both living in Provincetown, and she believes that the only reason he noticed her was that she looked uncannily like the girl on the cover of his then-latest book, An American Dream. I’ve tried to track down an image of that first-edition cover — apparently, it was a striking similarity, and for a time, everywhere my mom went people would remark on it. The novel is hardly even mentioned now, so it’s funny to think of a time when people were talking about it and its cover was a recognizable item.

My mom was only 21 or so but had graduated from high school when she was 16 and supported herself since as a court reporter in Boston, taking this one summer off to live with her lover at a friend’s inn. Mailer was in his 40s and married to one of the six wives. So everything remained very courtly and on the up & up. (This is the power of my mom — she is one of those people who can seem naive on first inspection, but is in fact just deeply good and independent minded and unwilling to participate in melodrama. She would make a horrible soap-opera character.)

I only learned of their friendship one summer during college when some old friends and I were working a crossword and one of the clues was “Author of ‘The Naked and the Dead’” and my mom looked up from her needlepoint and smiled. She’ll hardly mention it but I can tell she feels affectionately toward Mailer and protective. I should also add that Mailer’s character is the kind of character whose demons my mom would have the most tolerance for; witness her happy marriage to my dad, himself a hard-living pugilistic Yankee born just a year behind Mailer.

Her courtroom work in Boston had put her in contact with a lot snakes and liars — there was one well-connected politician who repeatedly showed-up at her doorstep in the middle of the night, expecting to be taken in because of his last name (creepy she said, because he shouldn’t have even known where she lived) — and so Mailer, even in all his bluster and alcoholism, was a far more appealing species of male. When asked about what Mailer was like, she’ll say, “He never pretended to be anything he wasn’t.” He was charming and funny, she says, tossing back drink after drink and still able to keep up an endless stream of intelligent talk. And finally, I think if my mom appeared then, in her lovely youth, as a sort of American Dream, Mailer would have too, mythic and larger than life and chasing after the Great American Novel like it was a buffalo or an eagle to be caught.