“The side of the street I was born on was Brooklyn, and the other side was Queens,” she added, “and so my address was Bernadette Mayer, 5914 Madison Street, Brooklyn-Queens, New York.”
Home life was not happy. The younger of Theodore and Marie (Stumpf) Mayer’s two daughters, she lived in a house with her maternal grandparents, whom she remembered as stodgy and mean.
“My grandfather used to yell at me for reading at night,” she said in the Poetry Foundation interview. “He would say, ‘Why don’t you read in the daytime when there’s light instead of wasting electricity!’”
Her mother, a secretary, was a staunch Catholic who discouraged her daughters from socializing with anyone from another faith or background.
Her father, who designed cameras for Fairchild Aircraft on Long Island, died of a cerebral hemorrhage when she was 12. Two years later, her mother died of breast cancer. “My relatives were afraid that if they adopted me, they would die too,” she said in 2020.
Her first attempt at higher education — at the College of New Rochelle, a Roman Catholic school in Westchester County — did not go well. The priests and nuns there told her “they would throw me out for wearing sandals and reading Freud,” Ms. Mayer told Artforum. She eventually finished college at the New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village, where she took a poetry class with Mr. Berkson, who introduced her to prominent poets like Mr. Ashbery and Frank O’Hara.
Even early in her career, Ms. Mayer “made decisions in her work that were very brave, very courageous,” the poet and photographer Gerard Malanga, who was then associated with Andy Warhol’s Factory, said in a phone interview. “She just did what she did, not really caring about what the style was in those days. I couldn’t pinpoint anybody else that she may have even mimicked.”
