[1][2] She grew up in Bensonhurst but moved to Manhattan, where she studied painting with Hans Hofmann and took up a bohemian lifestyle, being involved for several years with Edwin Fancher (who, together with Norman Mailer and Dan Wolf, founded The Village Voice) and briefly with Jack Kerouac.
She frequented the Village bars, especially those, like the San Remo and the Cedar Tavern, favored by artists and writers, and she dressed in fantastic, gypsylike outfits.
In the fall of 1956 they moved to a rented "sprawling white saltbox farmhouse" in Bridgewater, Connecticut, near a literary and artistic community that included Arthur Miller and William Styron in nearby Roxbury.
"[8] They moved back to New York in the fall of 1958, renting an apartment at 73 Perry St. in the Village; Adele bore another daughter, Elizabeth Anne, in 1959.
In the summer of 1960, in Provincetown, Massachusetts, Adele danced in a production called "The Pirates of Provincetown," and James Baldwin praised her performance, "though she had no lines beyond one scream, which she delivered with gusto in high 'method' style";[9] later that summer she had to bail Norman out of jail after a drunken run-in with the police.
In 1997, she published a memoir of her marriage to Mailer titled The Last Party, which recounted the violence and its aftermath.