In bed with the Jongs - Sydney Morning Herald
Erica Jong at home with Molly. Photo: Tim Knox/Guardian
IN ERICA Jong's vast apartment, the Manhattan skyline thrusting up to my right, an image of a naked woman sprawling across a wall to my left, we are talking about sex. Specifically, nudity. Erica's daughter, Molly Jong-Fast, is with us and I'm trying to find out what it was really like for her, growing up with a writer synonymous with the sexual revolution that era of feminism, threesomes, consciousness raising, cunnilingus and beautiful, bountiful pubic bushes.
Molly has made some outlandish claims about her mother in the past and it can be hard to work out what is true and what is satire. Did Erica really saunter around the house naked? "She was totally naked all the time," Molly says firmly, "and my grandmother, too." She prods her mother for confirmation. "Were you naked all the time?"
"Carmen is just going to prepare a little bit of cheese," Erica says airily, motioning to a woman working in the kitchen.
"There was a lot of disgusting nakedness," Molly repeats. "You sleep in the nude," she says accusingly to her mother.
"But lots of people sleep in the nude," I say. "It gets hot."
Her mother goes to fetch fruit.
"Not in America," Molly says. "We have airconditioning. I sleep in six sweaters."
"It's not like I took you to nudist camps for vacation," Erica says, returning with a bowl of ripe figs. "They're good," she says, biting into one. She proffers them graciously.
Some people were concerned about how Molly would cope with being raised by Erica, the woman who published Fear of Flying in 1973, coined the phrase "zipless f---" to describe a perfectly liberating encounter and became famous when the novel sold more than 18 million copies. When Molly was a child, therapists plagued her with the question: "Are you repressed by your mother's erotic writing?"
Frankly, the idea of Molly being repressed by anything seems absurd. Loud, arch and snappishly funny, she has the mien of a runaway train, words hurtling forth helter-skelter.
"The men my mother dated were unbelievable," Molly says. "Un-be-lieve-able."
"Scumbags!" Erica says, laughing uproariously.
"I mean, this is the problem with my mother," Molly says. "She is not a good judge of character. She's a wonderful person. She's very trusting.
"I don't know how she found Ken," Molly continues, referring to her mother's fourth husband, with whom she's been for 22 years, "because each boyfriend was worse than the next."
She runs through a list of possibly libellous, possibly true stories about the men in question a glittering roster of fat jailbirds and motorcycling drug dealers. "She had one boyfriend I loved and I was so disappointed she didn't marry him," Molly says. "But I think he was homosexual. There was another I liked, too, but he was married to someone else. Also, he wasn't successful. The only guy she ever went out with where I was like, 'Damn, he got away,' " she gives a loud finger snap, "was [financier] Steve Schwarzman."
"A Republican," Erica says.
"But we would be so rich," Molly says.
In her 2006 memoir, Girl [Maladjusted], Molly wrote about her "semi-celebrity childhood" with Erica, who divorced Jonathan Fast, her third husband, when their daughter was four. After that, Erica spent most of the 1980s dating. The main lesson Molly learnt in this period was never to date a man who "has more than one personality or is currently receiving electroshock treatment".
She returns to this subject in the essay "They Had Sex So I Didn't Have To", a highlight of the new anthology, Sugar in my Bowl. The book was edited by Erica, who wasn't sure she wanted to preside over a collection of sex essays by women more typecasting, she thought until the stories began rolling in, in all their juicy variety.
Editing the collection, Erica noticed a strong generational difference. "The older women were much raunchier," she says.
Molly maps out the gulf between young and old in her essay, writing that while her mother grew up in a culture in which sex was secretive and tied to marriage, she grew up in a sex-obsessed era, with Britney Spears, for instance, constantly onscreen, "pulsating in a bikini, musing on her virginity". They each reacted against their circumstances and against the mores of the previous generation. As Erica wrote in her 1994 memoir, Fear of Fifty, "rebelling generations follow quiescent ones, quiescent ones follow rebelling ones and the world goes on as it always has".
So Erica became a sexual rebel among rebels, rolling through relationships with men and women, writing ecstatic, funny books that celebrated sexual pleasure and opportunity and imagination. They were literary, significant novels, whose pages nonetheless fall open at the dirty parts when you pick them up in charity shops.
Their life was full of privilege, affluence and anxiety. As a single parent, Erica supported two households, in the country and the city, and had to be very driven, she says. A nanny helped to look after Molly and Erica was determined to give her daughter space to develop. Now, she fears, women are being shunted back to the home. She recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal about the rise of helicopter parenting, "the smothering surveillance of a child's every experience and problem". It's an approach, she believes, that imprisons women.
In response, Molly wrote that she spends "a tonne of time with my children, never travel, barely work and am a helicopter parent like you can't believe". Now 32, she married at 25 and has three children Max, 7, and twins Darwin and Beatrice, 3. Her husband, a former academic, works in finance. In 2007, the family was reported to have moved into a $US5 million apartment.
Molly writes in the anthology: "In the eyes of Erica Jong, I am a prude . . . a low-rent yuppie . . . I am the person my grandmother and mother would have watched in silent scorn."
As Molly speaks, coming across like a contrarian in her cups (while drinking nothing harder than water), Erica gazes at her through pretty, saucerish eyes. She looks astonished by what she has created. Astonished and proud. There is none of the envy or resentment that can characterise mother and daughter relationships. "You are funny, Molly," Erica says drily, as her daughter whips forth another wisecrack. "You really are."
As a teenager, Molly was bulimic. At 19, she checked herself into rehab to deal with an addiction to booze and drugs. She has been sober ever since and
has just published her second novel, The Social Climber's Handbook, about a woman who becomes a killer to aid her husband's career. Molly says it's about seizing power in a world that doesn't value you. "I know a lot of people, a lot of wives, who don't work now. The problem is that so much self-esteem . . . is tied up with your importance."
"Murder is the new feminism!" the two women say at once, laughing.
Molly glories in their differences. Where Erica is bohemian, Molly is bourgeois; where Erica is liberal, her daughter has an edge of conservatism. It's difficult to tell how many of Molly's stories are strictly accurate or wildly satirical.
The pair seem impeccably close. The day after our interview, they are off to the Hamptons for a holiday. "I'm very proud of her," Erica says. "She's taken on things I never did. I had one child, she has three. She's brave. And she must feel very loved, even though she says she has low self-esteem, because otherwise how could she satirise me? She knows I'll never take umbrage. I give her permission to be whatever she wants to be."
And wasn't that the promise of the sexual and feminist revolutions? That women (and men) would be liberated to define themselves as they wished? As a prude, helicopter parent and biting social satirist, Molly Jong-Fast is honouring her mother's values in the most unexpected way.
GUARDIAN
Sugar in My Bowl, edited by Erica Jong, is published by Harper Collins.
LIBERATION
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