I got a Moderna booster this afternoon. Typically this knocks me flat for about half a day (starting in the middle of the night), and I have planned accordingly. The timing is good, because we're having a mini heatwave, and the worst of it will be tomorrow.
Yesterday I learned that Erica Jong has dementia. Her daughter Molly Jong-Fast is publishing a memoir next month,
How To Lose Your Mother, and
an excerpt appeared in
Vanity Fair. Having lost my father to Parkinson's, I really related to Jong-Fast's essay. (My mother had memory issues towards the end of her life, but she was already in her nineties when that happened, so, as hard as it was, everything kind of felt like gravy by that point.)
As a mother, Jong apparently left a lot to be desired. But the revelation that she has dementia hit me like a gut punch, because she was tremendously important to me as a young writer. Growing up, I knew who she was, because she was very famous. I think my copy of
Fear of Flying was my dad's, which I took from one of his shelves and never gave back. But the way I got into Jong's work is more mysterious.
One day when I was a senior in high school, just getting into reading and writing poetry--I'd already written a lot of fiction by that point--I found a yellow paperback in my mom's room called
The Craft of Poetry (1974). It's a collection of
New York Quarterly interviews with poetry heavyweights. What's weird about this is that neither of my parents were readers of poetry, and I have no idea how the book wound up on their shelves. (It didn't occur to me to ask, and now there's no one to ask.) I certainly started reading the book because Anne Sexton was one of the interviewees. I would eventually read the whole book. (I still own it.) But the interview that changed my life was Jong's. Not just because the way she talked about writing poetry was so engaging, but because that interview was like a syllabus to me. It's where I learned about Colette's
Earthly Paradise (indeed, I am certain it's where I first heard about Colette), Virginia Woolf's
Writer's Diary, the poems of Pablo Neruda and Denise Levertov, the biography of Theodore Roethke, and more.
Jong was, I think, the first living poet whose work I loved. (I also read Adrienne Rich for the first time around this period.) I read and reread Jong's first two poetry books,
Fruits and Vegetables and
Half-Lives. Her influence on me was so strong that, a couple of years later in a college poetry workshop, the professor handed out copies of Jong's "Arse Poetica" when it was time to discuss one of my poems! I devoured her novels, too; probably her third,
Fanny: Being the True Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones, is the best (though I haven't read it since the 1980s), a rollicking 18th-century adventure tale told in 18th-century style.
Time went on, and I moved on to other writers and other influences. I couldn't help but notice that Jong's work began to deteriorate. Fame didn't help, I suspect (and possibly substance abuse was at play, too). I find her later novels fairly unreadable, though in 1993 she published
The Devil at Large, a very good book about Henry Miller. I can imagine a Jong who didn't hit it big with
Fear of Flying and whose work continued to mature. But the fact that she is now no longer the person she was--the writer who inspired me--is hard for me to fathom.
I love
this photo of Jong with Eileen Myles, Fran Winant, Joan Larkin, Jean Valentine, Honor Moore, Susan Griffin, Toi Derricotte, and Anne Waldman. Not a celebrity, but a poet among poets.
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