On The Bookshelf

The Sex Queen's

Da ter

while college hopping at Wesleyan
University, Barnard College and,N,Ie-w -
York University. Then she stropp- ed
out to write full time
Her work made its debut in the
pages of New York's Forward newspa-
per in 1997; the piece was a humor-
ous essay called "Family Curse," about
the pressure of trying to be a profes-
sional scribe in a
family overstaffed
Molly Jong-Fast, left,
with them.
dedicates her book to
Her father,
her grandma, Bettie
Jonathan Fast, who
Fast, "who taught me
is a mostly science
a thousand things,"
fiction novelist (The
and to her mother,
Beast) and a screen-
author Erica Jong,
writer,
remembers
"who I love more than
reading
his daugh-
anything in the world
ter's
poems
when
— my best friend, my
she
was
a
child.
mentor, my friend."
"There was a
dichotomy between
the brilliant content
of the poems and the horrible
spelling," he says. "She inherited the
bad spelling from me."
"Molly was doomed to be a writer,
says her grandfather Howard Fast, the
86-year-old author of 80 books,
including Spartacus, Freedom Road and
Greenwich, whose own first novel was
published when he was 18.
According to the elder Fast, more
than just literary talent has been
passed down through the family's
genes. "John inherited his bad spelling
from me, he says.

Novelist Molly Jong-Fast follows in the footsteps
of her "Fear of Flying" mother.

SUSAN SHAPIRO

Special to the Jewish News

I

'm a crazy cocaine addict with a
hankering for heroine, but other
than that, I'm just a nice Jewish
girl from the Upper East Side,"
says Miranda Woke, the teenage hero-
ine of Molly Jong-Fast's debut novel,
Normal Girl (Villard; $21.95).
The book features the Woke family,
members of uptown Manhattan's
divorced Prozac and Prada crowd.
They're Reform "Diet Jews" who use
the Maxwell House Haggada and "cel-
ebrate one holiday," the same holiday,
five times a year. "Which holiday is

Susan Shapiro, a former Detroiter, is

the author of the humor book "The
Male-to-Female Dictionary"

72

the egg-and-lamb holiday, and which
one is the one with the cookies that
look like hats?" Miranda asks.
Yet not all is well in her materialis-
tic Manhattan milieu.
When her boyfriend dies from an
overdose, the pretty, 19-year-old red-
headed Miranda falls into a drug and
alcohol haze and winds up in rehab.
In real life, the pretty, 21-year-
old redheaded Jong-Fast, who like her
character grew up in a Reform Jewish
household on the Upper East Side,
admits to "doing regrettable things in
the past." But, she says, she's been
drug- and alcohol-free for two years.
After finishing up her high
school years at the Riverdale Country
School, a private day school located in
a wooded area at the northwest corner
of Manhattan, she studied art history

Of course, the Jong part of her last
name comes from her mother, Erica
Jong, author of 17 books, including
Fear of Flying. In fact, Jong-Fast has
been a recurring character in her
mother's work.
In the essay "My Mother, My
Daughter and Me," Erica Jong recalls
her daughter reading chapters-in-
progress from Normal Girl and realiz-
ing the tables had turned. She was
now her daughter's character, the
"Mommy Monster."
"'Mommy, I hope you don't mind,'
my daughter mischievously says, 'but
I've made you a total narcissist and a
hopeless alcoholic in my novel.' But
who am I to censor her?" Jong writes.
"If I don't understand that fiction is
not fact, who the hell will? I have been
using my family as comic material for

25 years —
how can I
deny that
basic right
to my
daughter?"
Luckily,
autobio-
graphical
Jewish
humor runs
"If you can't be superficial
in the fami-
at
21, when can you be?"
ly. "People
says
the author.
called me
the sex
queen's daughter," Molly Jong-Fast
says. "It was hard. I went to England
with [my mother] to promote her
book three years ago. There's only one
thing worse than going a book tour:
That's going on your mother's book
tour.
"One tabloid journalist, who was
stalking me, screamed out, 'How
many men has your mother slept
with?' I turned around and said,
`How many men has your mother
slept with?'" she recalls, laughing.
Recently, Jong-Fast went on her
own British book tour; she was
thrilled with the reception there. And
she's been pleased with the novel's
buzz in general.
Author Jay McInerney (Bright
Lights, Big City) wrote, "Normal Girl
is a searing, bitchy, funny novel about
privilege in wretched excess" and
called Jong-Fast the "female Bret
Easton Ellis" — meant as a compli-
ment.
Even when she receives what could
be perceived as a slight —Publishers
Weekly called her novel "superficial"
— Jong-Fast chooses to look on the
bright side. "They also said it was
sexy and witty," she says. "I wasn't
trying to write the great American
novel. If you can't be superficial at 21,
when can you be?"
The best advice her mother ever
gave her, Jong-Fast says, is "write
what you know." Her new project, an
essay collection of previously pub-
lished and new work, does just that;
it includes a piece on being paranoid
about her appearance and a poignant
account of her parents' painful
divorce, which occurred when she
was 3.
Jong-Fast, determined to avoid her
mother's multiple marriages, is cur-
rently single and dating — and tak-
ing things slowly. She's been in love
twice, she admits — both times with
Jewish guys. "They're smarter, and
they treat women better," she says.
"And they get the jokes." ❑