At 19, Miranda Woke, the protagonist of Molly Jong-Fast's debut
novel, Normal Girl, is already being told by her acquaintances that she's
seen as a washed-up coke whore. As Jong-Fast explains below, some of the
parallels between Miranda's life and her own are intentional, but this
privileged child of New York literati no longer has the appetite for destruction
that fuels her protagonist's drug-and-alcohol-induced downward spiral. A few
months shy of her 22nd birthday, I meet her at a coffee shop in New York's
Upper East Side, where a nearby bookstore has copies of Normal Girl
displayed prominently in its front windows. (Later, after we've chatted, we'll
head back to that same store so she can pick up a copy of Vanity Fair
with an article about Robert Downey, Jr., we've discussed.)
RH: Were you encouraged to write when you were
growing up?
MJ-F: My parents always said that the worst thing you could
do was be a writer. They encouraged me to read, which was
important, but I don't think they encouraged me to write. I knew
when I became a writer that you didn't go into it for money, and you
didn't go into it for glory. You went into it because there was nothing
else you could do.
I saw that even my mother, who's very successful, went through
struggles as a writer. She went through very hard publicity--and I
know what that's like now. I've had stuff written about me that's
very painful on a personal level. Especially when you're only 21. It's
hard, it sucks. But I've put myself out there in the public, so I have
to deal with whatever they say about me.
RH: When did you realize there was nothing else for you
to do?
MJ-F: There was no time where I really felt, "This is it, I'm
going to be a writer." There were different times when I felt like I
wanted to be a writer... I'd been writing poetry for a number of
years before that, maybe since I was 10 or 11. But I didn't start to
write the novel until I was 18.
RH: How much of the hurtful publicity you have to face
now is about people trying to make connections between
and Miranda?
MJ-F: I have news for you (laughs). That's not hurtful
publicity. It's not great, but I have a much thicker skin than that.
That's nothing. I'm talking about people who write really mean stuff,
like "The only reason she has a book deal is because her mother's
Erica Jong, because the book's awful."
People making a connection between me and Miranda? That's fine. If
people make connections between Miranda and Molly, they're fooling
themselves to some degree, but it doesn't bother me. I wrote the
book to play into that. It's a social satire of the life of a child of
privilege. It's a big joke, a satire of myself. "Oh, wow, the daughter of
a famous writer wrote a book." This is a satire of the kind of book
you would've thought it might have been, the tell-all memoir thing.
And it's a satire of the Less Than Zero type of book.
RH: So how have you been handling the crush of
publicity?
MJ-F: Sure, the publicity is draining, but you know what?
Most young writers don't get this many reviews. They don't get this
many interviews, or this many copies of the book printed. That's all
good stuff. So I can sit here and complain about mean customer
reviews on Amazon.com, but the fact is that I've had advantages
most young writers don't get. So I shouldn't even flinch. The
publicity doesn't make me who I am. I know who I am--I'm not a
sound bite, I'm not my novel.
The book came out to fantastic reviews in England, to the point
where I was wondering if we'd even read the same book. Molly Jong-
Fast has more than lived up to the family name, that sort of thing.
Then it came out here and I've had some really mean reviews and I
start wondering if it's really any good. But then when I read the
book, I know that I've written something really interesting. And I'm
really proud of it.
RH: One of the challenges of doing a satire is to do it in a
way that still makes readers care about Miranda as a
character.
MJ-F: Sure. It's very easy to feel bad for a starving Bosnian
refugee child with one leg. If you don't feel bad for that person,
you're evil. But it's hard to feel bad for rich, good-looking people who
destroy their lives on drugs. So, yes, it's been a challenge. But it
wouldn't have been worth it if it wasn't a challenge. What would the
point be? If it hadn't been hard, I'd have written something else, or
not written anything at all.
RH: Some of the best passages in the book are about
Miranda's time in rehab, which reflect some of your own
experiences.
MJ-F: I met people who had incredibly sad lives, much sadder
than my life ever was. I met a 19 year-old who'd been to 19
different rehabs and couldn't put a day together without heroin. That
was the kind of stuff...I was more interested in writing about that
than anything else. I really wanted to say something about the
sadness of rehab, to say something for those people.
I always thought that what happened to you in rehab was that you
went and you got cured. And then you were fine, and you could have
the occasional vodka martini and everything was fine. I didn't
understand like I do now that you don't get cured, and once you get
to a certain point there's no going back. Abstinence is the only way
you can then get your shit together.
I felt bad about having been born with the advantages I had, and I
thought maybe if I hated myself for them, that would make up for
the inequality. That's why I almost killed myself with booze, beyond
being an alcoholic--I felt bad about all the privilege I'd gotten with
no reason to get it except birth. I couldn't explain that part of the
universe to myself.
Another part of it was that I was...I knew people didn't like the
advantages I had, so I didn't like myself with them. I felt bad, I
wanted to be liked, I took it all very seriously. And now that I've
written the novel, and published it, I think I've become less
apologetic for myself. I'm still self-deprecating. I still do amusingly
stupid things on a regular basis, but I don't feel as much like I have
to die for them.
RH: You have a core of self-worth now.
MJ-F:...which I didn't have then, right. And I don't even think
I had it when I was writing the novel, either. It's a recent thing, but
it changes everything. It used to be that if somebody would, for
example, say something bad about my mom, I'd keep quiet or I'd
play along. I don't do that anymore; I understand that it's okay to
have respect for myself and for my family.
I've been abstinent for three years this November. That's the biggest
accomplishment in my life. The other stuff doesn't mean as much
when you consider that I've gotten to lead two lives in one lifetime.
As much as I love what's happening now, in the larger scheme of my
life, maintaining my abstinence is more important.
RH: And, it sounds like, the core from which everything
else emerges.
MJ-F: Absolutely. To know me back then was to not like me. I
was a mess. It wasn't so much from the drugs, necessarily, but you
could talk to me and see that I was ready to fall apart at any
moment, at really inappropriate times. I didn't know how to handle
myself.
RH: And now you do.
MJ-F: I just got out of puberty. I'm okay, but I'm not the
bastion of security. It'd be one thing if I was 30, married, had a kid,
had an identity. But I'm 21, single, and live in my parents' building.
It's not like I got my shit completely together. I do in some ways, but
I had to fly out to San Francisco to do a reading, and I was in the
airport lounge, crying on the phone, "Mommy, I don't want to go."
And she was like, "I love you, now get on the plane."
RH: OK, last question. Who are some of your favorite
writers?
MJ-F: I think of them in tiers. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nabakov
are at the very top. That's the style I really like. I was just rereading
The Great Gatsby for like the 1500th time, just reading every
paragraph really slowly. I just want to kill myself, it's so good;
there's no way I'll ever get there.
And then I really like Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis and Tama
Jamowitz, but I really think of them together, as a genre. And then I
love Donna Tartt. And Truman Capote and Dorothy Parker, but
they're both separate from the others. What else do I like? I like
some pretty conventional stuff. I wouldn't put Anne Rice in the same
category as Nabakov, but I think she's a very interesting writer.
I live for David Sedaris. His books are so fantastic and wonderful and brilliant.
And I loved Robert Bingham's collection of short stories, Pure Slaughter
Value. I read it at least five times.
