Fear of Fifty

Table of Contents

 

 

“A half-century under her belt has not staled Jong's passion nor has painful controversy withered her talent for unflinching observation.... With a quotable line on almost every page, Jong's story is more than flash and fire—there's poetry and wisdom, too.”

-Kirkus Reviews

 

“A Bovary of our time without the dead end.”

—
The
Washington Post Book World

 

“The sharpness of her epigrams spurts across the page.... She is plainly wild, impossible, unreasonable, pursued by dark things, yet brings shafts of revelation and brightness into dark places. Erica Jong lives very dangerously.”

—
The
Times (London)

 

“What Jong calls a midlife memoir is a slice of autobiography that ranks in honesty, self-perception and wisdom with Simone de Beauvoir's Memoirs
of
a
Dutiful
Daughter and Mary McCarthy's Memories
of
a Catholic Girlhood, although Jong's memoir of a Jewish American princess is wittier than either.”

—Penny Perrick, The Sunday Times (London)

 

“It's clear from this book that Erica Jong is not afraid at all.... She is fierce and female and leaves nothing out.”

—
The
Boston Globe

 

“Jong's contemporaries will identify with many stages of the journey she recounts.... However, one need not be female or Jewish or advancing toward (or receding from) fifty to relish this lively, frank, absorbing memoir.”

—
Chicago
Tribune

 

“Fear of Fifty is so glorious that I pray Erica Jong lives to a full century so she'll write Fear
of
One Hundred.... This book radiates truth, humor, and deep insight.... Fear of Fifty, a mighty shout of joy, is an antidote to boredom.... You must read this celebration of life.”

—Rita Mae Brown

ALSO BY ERICA JONG

Poetry
Fruits & Vegetables
Half-Lives
Loveroot
At the Edge
of
the Body
Ordinary Miracles
Becoming Light

 

 

Fear
of
Flying
How to Save Your Own Life
Fanny: Being the True History of the Adventures
of
Fanny
Hackabout-Jones
Megan's Book of Divorce;
Megan's Two Houses
Parachutes &
Kisses
Serenissima:
A Novel
of Venice
(republished as
Shylock's Daughter)
Any Woman's Blues
Inventing Memory
Sappho's Leap

 

 

Witches
The Devil
at
Large:
Erica Jong on Henry Miller
What Do Women
Want?
Seducing the Demon

JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England · Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) · Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) · Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India · Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) · Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

 

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

 

Copyright © 1994, 2006 by Erica Mann Jong

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

 

Most Tarcher/Penguin books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchase for sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising, and educational needs. Special books or book excerpts also can be created to fit specific needs. For details, write Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Special Markets, 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

 

eISBN : 978-1-101-15342-0

 

 

 

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party web-sites or their content.

For my daughter, Molly—
your turn now

Let us answer a book of ink with a book of flesh and blood.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON

“You know you're on the skids when you play yourself in the movie version of your life,” my father used to warn me when I was nine. I had no idea what he was talking about.

He had come out of show business to make a killing in the tchotchke
¹
business, and though he trafficked in ceramics and phony antique dolls, all his metaphors were drawn from that other business he had left in his twenties.

“Never follow a dog act” was his other favorite saying. I never knew what that meant either. Or how it applied to my life. But, as it happened, my life was to teach me both these lessons.

“You might as well give up, Mom,” my daughter says. “You're a seventies writer.” My daughter says “seventies” as a synonym for “old stone age.” “The kids in my class say you write pornography—is that true?”

I explain to Molly that women who push boundaries are often treated with something less than respect, and I give her Fear of Flying to read. She sits absorbed by it on a train from Venice to Arezzo the summer of her thirteenth birthday. Every few minutes she looks up at me and asks, “Hey, Mom—did this really happen?” or “Who was that guy anyway?”

I tell her the truth. In the funniest way I know. About a hundred pages into the book, she loses interest and picks up The Catcher
in
the Rye.

A year later, on a publicity tour for The Devil
at
Large, my book about Henry Miller, Molly confides to Wilder Penfield III of the Toronto Sunday
Sun:
“I make it a policy not to read any of my mother's books because [they] really scare me. I got a hundred pages into Fear
of
Flying and I was so nervous! I kept asking her, ‘Did you really do this?' I was so shocked, I had to stop reading.”

She smiles with satisfaction as all her quotes are written down. She's dying to do her riff on “My Mother's Husbands”—exit, stage right, husband number 1; enter, stage left, husband number 2; et cetera—but I give her a withering look and kick her under the table.

At fourteen, Molly already knows that I'm her material, just as she sometimes has been mine. If she has to put up with a writer-mother, she'll take her revenge with words.

Molly is never at a loss for words.

Nobody could make her follow a dog act.

So here I am at fifty, whiplashed between the generations. I am reduced to a sort of missing link in the evolutionary chain. I have all this advice from my father and all these riffs from my daughter. Somehow I have to make sense of it all.

That's how this book was born.

At fifty, the last thing I wanted was a public celebration. Three days before my birthday I took off for a spa in the Berkshires with Molly (then thirteen)—slept in the same bed with her, giggling before sleep, slumber party style-worked out all day (as if I were a jock, not a couch potato), learned trendy low-fat vegetarian recipes, had my blackheads expunged, my flab massaged, my muscles stretched, and thought about the second half of my life.

These thoughts alternated between terror and acceptance. Turning fifty, I thought, is like flying: hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

When, on the evening of my birthday, my husband (who shares the same birthday but is one year older) arrived, I had to adjust to the disruption of my woman's world. He liked the food but wisecracked about the holistic hokum. His critical-satirical male eye did not quite ruin my retreat but somehow tainted it. I was doing inner work in the guise of outer exercise, and his presence made that inner work harder.

Real men don't like spas.

The year before, when he turned fifty, I had made a party for him. I sent out invitations that read:

I still couldn't face fifty, so I knew I did not want him to reciprocate for my fiftieth birthday. Nor did I want to do what Gloria Steinem had done: make a public benefit, raise money for women, and rise resplendent in an evening gown, shoulders dusted with glitter—as Gloria's lovely shoulders were—and say: “This is what fifty looks like.”

Who can fail to admire such brave affirmation of older women? But I veered between wanting to change the date on my Who's Who entry and wanting to move to Vermont and take up organic gardening in drawstring pants and Birkenstocks.

I needed something private, female, and contemplative to sort out these conflicting feelings. A spa was perfect. And my daughter was the perfect companion—despite her adolescent riffing that spares no one, her mother least of all. Still, there is something about a woman turning fifty that is female work, mother-daughter work, not to be shared with the whole male world—or even with those representatives of it whom one loves and cherishes.

My husband and I have always made much of our birthday—in part because we share it and because, having met in midlife, after the wreckage of many relationships, we treasure the synchronicity of our births during World War II, a world of ration coupons and fear of Axis invasions that we only dimly remember from twice-told family tales. One year we took our daughters to Venice—my magic city—another year we made a blast in our new apartment in New York, bought jointly—the ultimate sign of commitment in a world where marriages die like moths.