May 4, 2005

Book Review

Fear Of Crying

Putting aside nepotism and the publishing industry's insatiable need to ogle at its navel, is there any reason the precocious daughter of a feminist literary star and the granddaughter of an iconic political writer should publish a novel at 21 and a memoir before most humans can get jobs with health insurance? Moreover, is there ever a reason for anyone under AARP age to even consider writing a memoir?

Hold that knee-jerk "no."

For reasons good, bad and ugly, readers (and particularly readers who fancy themselves writers) might be inclined to chuck contemptuous Molotovs in the general direction of 26-year-old Molly Jong-Fast (Normal Girl). And not just because she's young and published and you're not. The daughter of Erica Jong (Fear of Flying) and granddaughter of late commie pulpster Howard Fast (Spartacus, Tom Paine), Jong-Fast was reared on Manhattan's Upper East Side and in the leafy suburb of Weston, Connecticut. Despite the conventional wisdom about assumptions, it's probably not going too far out on a limb to think her road to authordom was less cumbersome than most.

However, it only takes a few pages into The Sex Doctors in the Basement (Villard, New York, 2005) to learn that she has talent. Maybe even a lot. More to the point of instant gratification, she's possessed of a delightfully infectious sense of humor. And this more than anything makes up for her sin of premature reflection.

While it doesn't make any lofty proclamations toward genre revolution, The Sex Doctors is something of an anti-memoir. One won't find an Oprah-styled epiphany in these pages. (You know, the kind where the authors reach an oh so precious realization about their cultural identity, gender or worse still, a Gloria Gaynor denouement of personal empowerment.) If anything, Jong-Fast's tales of woe are laced with winks and tongues-in-cheeks and tongues going plllltttt!

Sex Doctors is less a cohesive narrative than a collection of essays about coming of age with absolutely no idea of what you should be coming to. As Jong-Fast fesses in her introduction, "I have no idea what normal is."

For much of her life, Mom is involved in a string of ill-conceived romantic entanglements; Dad is less than present and Grandpa is convinced the New York Times editorial board was a Trotskyite cabal out to sabotage him. There are summers in Venice with other ignored celebrity offspring, middle school friends who grow up into billboard models, and then there's Joan Collins, a family friend who informs the author (at age 13) that she's "too fat." (Is anyone acceptably fat?)

Growing up in a Manhattan townhouse and "poverty stricken rural Connecticut," as she calls it, might not lead to a childhood coining proverbs, but some should at least make their way onto a coffee mug:

"Celebrities are just like us, if we were famous."

"All children want ponies but almost no children should be given ponies."

"Famous people are very interested in their children. So interested, in fact, that they hire numerous nannies to monitor their children and report back."

Jong-Fast hints at a few of her vices: food, addiction, addiction to food and addiction to substances less forgiving. And then there's the ping-pong game of narcissism and self-loathing that infects New Yorkers like a regional plague of psychological herpes. Fortunately, she never makes the fatal mistake of busking for sympathy. Jong-Fast knows her story is not Angela's Ashes of the Upper East Side. Rather, she mocks the idea implicit in nearly every memoir that readers should feel their pain. Witness: "…sometimes when the girl in the coffee place on the corner runs out of donuts, I have to get in a taxi and go all the way down to 83rd Street to get Krispy Kreme donuts. When that happens, I'm reminded of all the other hardships that have happened in my life…"

Ultimately Jong-Fast wins our sympathy, and even if we can't always feel her pain, we share her giggles. Is this book self-indulgent? Perhaps, but find me a memoir that isn't. In fact, The Sex Doctors could even stand to be more serious (a rare criticism of any memoir), as there's indeed much to be said for struggling for your identity in the shadow of a famous, or semi-famous, family. In the meantime, laughing isn't such a bad fate.
John Dicker

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