Windchill Summer

Written by Norris Church Mailer, Windchill Summer was published in 2000. Born Barbara Jean Davis and raised in Atkins (Pope County), she married renowned author Norman Mailer following a chance meeting in Russellville (Pope County). This book and its sequel, Cheap Diamonds, are semi-autobiographical novels that begin with her Arkansas childhood and continue after she left the state to live in New York City.

Although it is a work of fiction, one of Windchill Summer’s underlying themes is the limited options for young women in small rural towns. In this respect, it presages The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America (2023), written by Monica Potts of Clinton (Van Buren County) and constituting a nonfiction account of small-town life in Arkansas. Despite being published twenty years apart, many of the same circumstances for girls, such as teen pregnancy and sexual abuse by family members, are central themes based on personal experience in the books by both Mailer and Potts.

Windchill Summer is narrated by twenty-one-year-old Cheryl Ann “Cherry” Marshall, who is growing up in the fictional town of Sweet Valley, Arkansas. While the character is based on herself, Mailer said that the name “Cherry” was derived from the name of a girl she knew in Arkansas. Set in 1969, the book opens with Cherry working a summer job on the night shift at the fictional Atlas pickle factory. She hopes to earn money for college at Arkansas’s fictitious DuVall University. Enduring harassment by a 300-pound filthy-smelling boss, Cherry is determined to find a different kind of life.

The book’s title refers to the tendency of some meteorologists to state the “windchill factor” when giving a weather report. One of the characters claims it is something that makes people feel they’ve been lied to about the temperature, making it even worse than it is. In the larger context of the book, the “windchill” refers to the sense that things we are told are often not what they seem to be.

Cherry’s fictitious hometown of Sweet Valley received its name not because it is particularly sweet but was, instead, named for a local family. One of the Sweet clan was formerly the class bully in Cherry’s school, later becoming the local deputy sheriff.

There are two social centers of the town: the truck stop and churches like the fictional First Apostolic Holiness Church of God. Windchill Summer emphasizes the prominence of religion in small towns like Cherry’s where young people are told that such things as dancing and seeing movies are sins that will cast them into hell.

The plot moves between the beliefs about sin that young people have been taught in church and the prevalence of sex that leaves teen girls pregnant. In the book, sex is seen as something that takes place more from boredom than passion. Teenage mothers, married or otherwise, are often forced to leave school and spend the rest of their lives working the line in the pickle plant. This, Cherry states, is “not much of an advertisement for young love.”

The year 1969 when the book takes place is significant. Along with being the summer of the moon landing, it was a time when everyone in town watched Walter Cronkite on the news to see if they recognized any of the young men fighting in Vietnam. Local men were being killed, and “the war hung over our heads like the shadow of a hawk on the chicken yard.” In the book, there is also the murder of a young girl, which becomes a main topic of the town’s rumor mill. Although the residents of the town are predominantly white, Cherry expresses an admiration for Black culture, with “juke joints and bar-b-que shacks, blues and jazz, churches and gospel music—shared misery and shared joy.”

Some of the real-life Arkansas references in the book include the Little Rock Zoo in Little Rock (Pulaski County), the Japanese American internment camp in Jerome (Drew County), and what Cherry calls “Nehi Mountain,” a stand-in for Mount Nebo in Yell County.

Windchill Summer earned positive reviews in major outlets such as Entertainment Weekly, the Washington Post, and the New York Times Book Review, which called it smoothly written and sweetly sentimental. The reviews often called attention to her well-drawn characters. Although Windchill Summer can be read as a stand-alone, Mailer’s follow-up novel, Cheap Diamonds, continues the story. Her nonfiction Ticket to the Circus gives the details to confirm it.

For additional information:
Berger, Joseph. “Norris Church Mailer, Artist and Ally, Dies at 61.” New York Times, November 21, 2010. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/22/books/22mailer.html (accessed November 20, 2024).

Brantley, Max. “Norris Church Mailer Dies at 61.” Arkansas Times, November 22, 2010. https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2010/11/22/norris-church-mailer-dies-at-61 (accessed November 20, 2024).

Mailer, Norris Church. Cheap Diamonds: A Novel. New York: Ballantine Books, 2008.

———. A Ticket to the Circus: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 2011.

———. Windchill Summer: A Novel. New York: Ballantine Books, 2001.

Nancy Hendricks
Garland County Historical Society