She’s Her Mother’s Daughter, but Her Life’s Plot Is All Her Own

Molly Jong-Fast makes no apologies for her family connections.

“Nepotism totally gets a bum rap, [but] at least you know the person didn’t sleep his or her way to the top,” Jong-Fast said. “I’m 23 years old, and I’m on television. That probably would not be happening if my mother wasn’t Erica Jong,” said Jong-Fast, whose father, Jonathan Fast, is also a novelist. Jong-Fast’s first novel, “Normal Girl,” which was published by Random House last year, has just been released in paperback by Villard Books. On Friday, she and her mother begin a joint book tour through Italy.

Jong-Fast, who lives in New York, was in town recently to promote her book. Over lunch, she held forth on fame, family and insecurity while picking avocado out of her sushi roll and offering a whispered commentary on other lunch guests at Asia de Cuba in West Hollywood. “I can’t believe these people,” she whispered, pointing to a bronzed guy at the nearby pool. “Look at that guy, he’s an Adonis.”

Watching, and being watched, are twin themes in her life.

“I would be in my mothers’ books, and people would go, ‘Oh, so you’re the daughter. I know you. You were twins in this book,”’ she said. (The book was “Parachutes & Kisses.”) “That was horrible. And you’re not even getting the money from these books.”

Her semiautobiographical novel chronicles a teenage girl’s self-destructive journey from the Upper East Side to drug-induced hell.

Its protagonist, Miranda Woke, has a strained, uncomfortable relationship with her mother, a socialite who has little time for her daughter. After Woke leaves rehab, she talks to her mother, who is in Paris: “I really miss you ... Aren’t you going to say you miss me too? That’s what a normal mother would say. A normal mother would say she missed her daughter. Any number of my previous shrinks would confirm this.” Unconvincingly, the mother tries to reassure her before running off.

Jong-Fast’s mother is good humored about the maternal portrait.

“I come from a family of portrait painters. When they didn’t have a commission they would paint their children and their spouses,” Jong said. “It seems completely normal to use your family in portraits and in writing.”

But portraits are never entirely true to life, she said. “You exaggerate things. You do anything for the sake of humor.”

Her daughter’s decision to become a writer surprised Jong.

“Molly said it was a very unhappy profession, [but] all of sudden she was possessed,” she said. “It just happened, like it was in the DNA.”

Her fear was of failing, not flying.

“I thought that trying [to write] would be like taking her on,” Jong-Fast said. “What I didn’t understand is that you have to take your mother on.”

As a teenager, Jong-Fast experienced more mortifying moments than most. For one thing, her mother wrote forthrightly about sex, coining in her breakthrough 1973 novel “Fear of Flying” a two-word synonym for sex with a stranger that started with the word “zipless.”

“I haven’t read any of my mom’s books,” she said. After skimming “Fear of Flying,” she decided against it. “I was like, ‘Whoa, Mom. This is pretty racy material.”’

Jong’s three divorces include a very public split from Fast when Jong-Fast was 4. Jong is now married to her fourth husband, attorney Kenneth David Burrows. The lack of trust exhibited by her daughter’s generation, Jong told Talk magazine in October last year, “is partly because [they are] growing up in the shadow of brutal divorces.”

Add to that, in Jong-Fast’s case, the shadow of fame.

“It wasn’t like I was Madonna’s kid or anything,” Jong-Fast said. But what she described as her mother’s “weird fame” made her distrustful of other people’s motives. “I have a boyfriend [and] a number of people who I smile at. But I really don’t think I have any close friends except for my mom,” who she describes as “really nice ... but insane.”

Her mother, said Jong-Fast, “has to work a lot. Ninety percent of the time, she’s thinking about her books, not about me. But she loves me. Like, insanely. She’s so proud of me, so that’s cool.”

Whereas her mother grew up in a modest home, the daughter of immigrants, Jong-Fast came of age in “wretched excess.”

“It made us totally different people because she wanted to come toward this kind of thing,” Jong-Fast said, gesturing toward the luxury of the Mondrian Hotel, “and I wanted to get away from it.”

Jong-Fast attended the Trevor Day School, where Sophie Dahl (now a well-known model, and the granddaughter of writer Roald Dahl) became a friend. After graduating from Riverdale Country School, she went to Wesleyan University, Barnard College and New York University but never graduated.

Like her protagonist, Jong-Fast worked in an art gallery as a teenager, did drugs, consumed conspicuous amounts of alcohol and lived in an apartment on 8th Street where friends would shoot heroin in the bathroom.

“It was horrible,” Jong-Fast said. “I basically tried to kill myself

She doesn’t reveal much about her drug and alcohol problems. “It’s just a very boring topic,” but she proudly declares that she has been abstinent from drugs and alcohol for four years.

Her novel uses elements from her life. But it’s tongue-in-cheek, she said.

“I did that to talk about fiction, nonfiction, a novel, memoir, all the dimensions,” Jong-Fast said. “In a way, it’s meant to be a satire--the satire of the novel you expected me to write.”

Not everyone has reacted kindly.

“Jong-Fast expends so much energy trying to sound wise beyond her years--a large percentage of her sentences seem to be lacking only the word ‘darling’--that whatever original perspective she might have lent to the story gets lost in the shuffle,” wrote a New York Times reviewer.

And she was accused of cheating.

“A lot of people were like, ‘Hey, that’s your life ... You can’t do that. You have to make this stuff up.”’

She doesn’t hide that she was hurt by the criticism.

“That was my worst fear and to have it happen,” she said with a shudder. “My whole life I just wanted everybody to like me. ... I wrote the book so people would like me and when [it] was published, I realized people like you less.”

These days, Jong-Fast is working on her second novel but is in no hurry to finish. Wounds inflicted by literary critics are still fresh.

“Look, I think I’m good. That’s why I think I will be able to keep writing,” she said. “The proof is in the pudding. ... You’ll get your first book published, but you’ll never get your second book published because of your mom.”