I mentioned Norman Mailer’s _Tough Guys Don’t Dance _in “Genius and Lust,” and maybe this is one of the reasons I fell into it as autobiographical: One of my enduring memories is Mailer’s representation of Provincetown as an off-season shore town, because I could so readily identify with the shift, living, as I always have, close enough to the Jersey Shore that off-season visits were common enough.

The place turned gray before one’s eyes. Back in summer, the population had been thirty thousand and doubled on weekends. It seemed as if every vehicle on Cape Cod chose to drive down the four-lane state highway that ended at our beach. Provincetown was as colorful then as St. Tropez, and as dirty by Sunday evening as Coney Island. In the fall, however, with everyone gone, the town revealed its other presence. Now the population did not boil up daily from thirty thousand to sixty, but settled down to its honest sediment, three thousand souls, and on empty weekday afternoons you might have said the true number of inhabitants must be thirty men and women, all hiding.

Tough Guys Don’t Dance by Normal Mailer