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.
