Fear of Fifty by Erica Jong

Author:Erica Jong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

When I entered the hospital I wasn’t sure whether my heroine or I was having that baby. Consequently, Molly’s birth certificate at first read “Belinda”—the name of Fanny’s daughter. I caught my mistake, then lay about in bed inventing names for my beautiful child. Glissanda, Ozma, Rosalba, Rosamund, Justina, Boadicea ... I doodled on a pad. Then Molly Miranda came into my head. And Jon agreed.

“Good thing you came to, Mom,” Molly says.

Molly’s birth redeemed everything, and Fanny did the rest. I suppose I like Fanny better than any of my other novels (so far) because its unique challenges gave me deep satisfaction. The challenge of recreating eighteenth-century language and plot, of turning male picaresque upside down. It made me wholly happy in a way I have not been since I was six—and so did my marriage to Jon, till it didn’t.

It’s easier to write about pain than about joy. Joy is wordless. After that spasm of life in orbit, I was delighted to be obscure, hiding in the country.

We contemplated moving to Princeton for the library, to the Berkshires for the scenery, to Key West for the light, to Colorado for the mountains, but wound up in Weston, Connecticut (within driving distance of both the Beinecke Library and Manhattan), leading an almost idyllic life: writing, yoga, dogs, and cooking. The only mistake we made was letting People magazine photograph us for a happy couples piece. Those pieces make divorce inevitable, just as surely as Time cover stories lead to death, bankruptcy, and the kidnapping of beloved babies.

Fanny made me happy because it let me live with the Oxford English Dictionary always open on my desk—and what can be happier than that? Jon made me happy because of his humor and his sense that nothing could be better than writing and doing yoga. And Molly made me happy because she was my ordinary miracle, produced somehow by God, while my mind was on other things—the origin of the word “fichu,” for example.

But fame never made me happy, though that, of course, did not mean I wanted to give it up. Fame is the great test of character. Do you lose or find yourself as a result of it? Most of us lose ourselves at least for a while. Some of us come back. Most do not. At that time, I wanted to get lost in the woods of Connecticut, nursing my baby, looking up words in the OED, and reading Smollett or Fielding or Swift every morning to get the cadence of the period in my head. Fame terrified and perplexed me. In three years it had picked me up and tossed me into the briar patch. I wanted to get as far away from those painful memories as I could. The reign of Queen Anne was perfect. I had died, but I was about to be reborn as a redhead in a riding habit.

I had at least survived. So would she.

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