Most people inevitably wind up becoming a version of their mother, often despite their best efforts. Even if you think your mother was not a very good mother to you, you realize how hard it is to fully escape your past. Sometimes you long to become like your mother, and you don’t measure up. This is probably easier to navigate if your mother isn’t famous and a famous egotist. Mine is the writer Erica Jong, who happens to be both.
It’s an understatement to say my mother and I are close — or were close. It’s also impossible for me to say whether we are now, because of her dementia. I sometimes refer to her in the past tense, only to correct myself. She is still blond. She is still short. She still has a button nose. But she can no longer navigate her phone or the television remote. My mother is a ghost of herself: transparent, unreachable, untouchable. She has devolved into a body — all flesh and no mind.
I’m realizing that a sort of gooey sitcom resolution is not in the cards for my mother and me. Sometimes the people we most need to love us stubbornly refuse to give us what we need. Sometimes we run out of time to fix everything.
A year ago, I wrote the kind of confessional book she’d spent her life writing, the kind of book that made her unbelievably famous and, it always felt to me, didn’t leave her much time for me when I was a kid. It was published just after Mother’s Day.
When I was a teenager, I sometimes pretended to be her. Unlike the mothers of many of my friends growing up, dressing like mine meant wearing low-cut tops, high heels and short skirts. She coined a term for a casual sexual encounter: the “zipless” kind. This was the woman who had an open marriage, who told 10-year-old me with a naughty wink that “what happens at the Frankfurt Book Fair stays at the Frankfurt Book Fair.” This was the woman who took me to Italy for summers ostensibly so I could learn Italian but really so she could have an affair with an Italian count.
I quickly found that I did not have the constitution to be Erica Jong. I tried to do all the things she did, but I couldn’t do them nearly as well. I fell in love with the men I had sex with and got addicted to the cigarettes she casually smoked. I got drunk and blacked out. She could have a few drinks. I could not. She could take a Xanax. I could not. I took handfuls of benzos. I deviated my septum from doing cocaine. She might have been an alcoholic — I’ve always thought she must be — but I was several orders of magnitude more alcoholic, if that’s possible. At 19 years old, I ended up at a Hazelden inpatient rehab in Minnesota.
Once I got sober, I could no longer pretend to be her or, at least, the worst parts of her. Maybe because of this or in spite of it, I married at 24 and had three children in rapid succession. I became the kind of woman my mother used to make fun of. I lived in the same apartment, stayed married to the same man, even joined a temple. It was the kind of bourgeois life my mother found a little embarrassing.
There are so many ways in which I would have loved to become my mother. Her curiosity, her kindness, her incredible generosity and her humor. But I will never be more influential than her. Her first novel, “Fear of Flying,” sold 37 million copies. It gave women permission to ask for more from their lives. Those women still come up to me, more than half a century later. Sometimes they are apologetic, but I tell them not to be. I am deeply proud of my mother’s legacy, of her ability to connect with her readers. It’s easy to say my mother’s legacy was just sex, but sex is always about more than sex. Sex is about freedom. All I’ve ever wanted as a writer was to connect with readers, to help them see the world differently.
Probably that is why I wrote a book about my mother, to try to be her one last time.
It meant traveling the way my mother used to travel when I was growing up. I did a lot of interviews and got invited to give a lot of talks at book fairs. It had nowhere near the impact that “Fear of Flying” did. It was a best seller but didn’t sell nearly as well as her biggest books. It still made me feel oddly like her. People sometimes walk up to me at restaurants to tell me how much it meant to them. During a book publicity stop in Los Angeles, I had a moment of déjà vu: I was talking to a TV host who’d interviewed my mother many times, in a room that looked distinctly 1970s. Was I living my life, or had I time-traveled back to hers? It was unnerving. Trying to become my mother in my late 40s felt sort of sad, even desperate.
When my children were small, two of them had developmental issues that meant spending hours and hours with therapists. I stopped writing so I could take them from physical therapy to speech therapy to occupational therapy. The therapists’ waiting rooms became my second home, and sometimes my mother would come and sit with me. It was weird because she wouldn’t do that kind of thing with me when I was a kid. I’d beg her to pick me up at school, but she never could. Sometimes when we were sitting in those waiting rooms staring at our phones, she would apologize. I could have told her it was OK, but I didn’t want to let her off the hook.
I regret that now. I should have forgiven her. I’ve forgiven her now, but she won’t ever know.
Molly Jong-Fast is the host of the “Fast Politics” podcast and the author of “How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir.”
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