Molly Jong-Fast’s unsparing account of her famous mother’s decline into dementia, and their life together, is just turning the tables.
Ever since she was a child, Molly Jong-Fast has struggled with the disorienting feeling that there are two versions of her.
There’s her real self, then there’s her literary doppelgänger, the Molly-like character who crops up frequently in her mother Erica Jong’s memoirs and novels. Whenever a stranger or acquaintance seemed to know intimate details about her — like her bratty behavior as a teenager, or her struggles with drug and alcohol addiction — Ms. Jong-Fast would freeze. She had to assume they had read all about her in her mother’s books.
Naturally, she resented having her private life, including some of her worst moments, repurposed as literary fodder. So she recognizes that some will see her brutally honest, scorched-earth memoir about her mother — a feminist and cultural icon who is now 83 and has dementia — as an act of literary retribution. She doesn’t entirely disagree.
“It feels like a huge betrayal,” Ms. Jong-Fast said in an interview at her bright and spacious apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where she sipped a cappuccino and cradled Bucephalus, one of her three small white Chinese crested dogs, in her lap. “I sold out Erica Jong, but it’s sort of in honor of her.”
Ms. Jong became famous with the release of her 1973 debut novel, “Fear of Flying” — a story about a married woman’s pursuit of casual sex. It became a critical and commercial blockbuster that drew praise from John Updike and Henry Miller and went on to sell more than 20 million copies. Ms. Jong was lauded for her unapologetic depictions of women’s pursuit of sexual pleasure and autonomy, back when such subjects were still scandalous. She was equally uninhibited about exposing personal details in her memoirs and interviews, and ruthlessly pillaged from the lives of those around her. Anyone in her orbit risked being reanimated as thinly disguised characters in her work — friends, husbands, boyfriends and exes, as well as the person she professed to love most, her only child, Molly.
