{"id":4046,"date":"2025-06-04T05:58:16","date_gmt":"2025-06-04T13:58:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/?p=4046"},"modified":"2025-06-04T09:25:38","modified_gmt":"2025-06-04T17:25:38","slug":"is-turnabout-fair-play","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/2025\/06\/04\/is-turnabout-fair-play\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Turnabout Fair Play?"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

I have been playing around with the idea of writing a memoir about my colorful childhood for more than a decade, writing up brief, mostly comic episodes about bats and Christmas trees and the conversion of our family barn into House Beautiful. But I don’t seem to be able to find the connective tissue that would make those episodes into something cohesive. The problem, really, is that a lot of that connective tissue is pretty dark, and I haven’t been sure how to write that stuff. And that I am constantly aware of what I think of as the Rashomon<\/em> factor.

Rashomon<\/em> is a Japanese film from 1950 staring the brilliant Toshiro Mifune, in which the same story is told from four different perspectives. A samurai is found murdered in a forest; a priest, a bandit, the wife of the samurai, and the samurai himself (through a medium) tell their versions of the story, in none of which they are the villains. Every single event ever has many different versions. Especially<\/em> in families. In writing a memoir you either have to be rock-solid in your conviction that your version is the true one, or ready to deal with the anger or anguish of family response.<\/p>\r\n

There was a fascinating article in The New York Times on a new book by Molly Jong-Fast<\/a>, about growing up as the daughter of writer Erica Jong. In the ’70s Erica Jong was sort of a literary “It” girl, the author of the novel Fear of Flying<\/em>, and the creator of the phrase “zipless fuck.” I read Fear<\/em> when it came out; it was not my cup of tea. \u00a0Jong continued to write, both novels and memoirs that made her money and acclaim. The memoirs were… honest? brutal? opportunistic? about \u00a0some of the worst moments in her daughter’s life–from the viewpoint of her mother. I imagine (it’s pretty clear in the article) that it was not fun being the only daughter of Erica Jong.<\/p>\r\n

I both get what Jong did and I don’t. As a parent, there are times in the lives of your children that have an effect on you, the parent. I can think of half a dozen such events in my own life, which were as hard on me and my husband as they were on the kid. I would not publish them (certainly not without the blessings of the child in question). I know there’s a whole genre of memoir out there: parents telling the saga of life with kids who have addictions, or terrible diseases, or depression. They serve a good and useful purpose, I think, of giving people who may be on the cusp of such experiences a view of the terrain ahead. And God knows a parent going through something terrifying and awful with their child is having an experience themselves, which they may want to write about.<\/p>\r\n

But from everything I can gather, Erica Jong’s use of Molly’s life was opportunistic. She appeared to write about Molly, not as a child she loved, but as a lifestyle accessory that provided interesting writing prompts. \u00a0Since turnabout is fair play, Molly has just published a memoir, How to Lose Your Mother, <\/em>in part about her mother’s descent into dementia. As the Times notes,\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

Ms. Jong-Fast follows in her mother’s footsteps in one crucial way: She holds nothing back. With the kind of withering close-to-the-bone judgments that only a daughter can level at her mother she takes Ms. Jong apart, describing her as a fame-chasing, alcoholic narcissist who had little time for or interest in her daughter.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

On the other hand, “Ms. Jong-Fast may be mangling her mother’s reputation, but in a weird way, she’s honoring her legacy.” And it appears that Erica Jong approves.<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

“My mom always said to me, You sit down at the computer and you open a vein,” she said. “Why bother writing a memoir if you’re not going to tell the whole story.”<\/p>\r\n

Reached by phone recently, Ms. Jong… still agreed with that principle, even now that their roles are reversed.<\/p>\r\n

“When you’re a writer your life is really an open book, and that’s true also for your child… I write about her, she writes about me, ” Ms. Jong said. “If you want to be an honest writer, you have to speak about it all. None of it bothers me.”<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

Well, isn’t that swell for for Erica Jong?<\/p>\r\n

I had a childhood that was troubled in some ways and insanely privileged in others. When I move toward writing about some of the troublesome bits I remember my mother’s reaction when I was a teenager and I talked about maybe getting some therapy. “Why? So someone can tell you I was a terrible mother?” As it happened, that wasn’t what I was looking for in therapy (when I finally got into therapy, although the subject of my mother did come up a time or two). But I’m very sensitive to the fact that my mother, who has been dead since 1986, would hate to have her shortcomings broadcast.<\/p>\r\n

I don’t think you write a memoir in order to tell the definitive truth; you write it to tell your<\/em> truth, whatever that may be. But you do so in the awareness that your vantage point may be entirely different from that of other people who populate your story; you don’t gape with surprise when what you thought was Holy Writ is disputed, vehemently, by others who were standing on a different rock. And you accept, gracefully, the feelings your work may occasion.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have been playing around with the idea of writing a memoir about my colorful childhood for more than a decade, writing up brief, mostly comic episodes about bats and Christmas trees and the conversion of our family barn into House Beautiful. But I don’t seem to be able to find the connective tissue that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,20],"tags":[1064,239,905,1065],"class_list":["post-4046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","category-process","tag-erica-jong","tag-madeleine-robins","tag-memoir","tag-molly-fast-jong"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4046"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4053,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4046\/revisions\/4053"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}