Review by Heather Mallick (1994)

Fear of Fifty: A Midlife Memoir
By Erica Jong
HarperCollins, $29.95

Either Erica Jong is a warm, wise and witty trailblazer or she is the biggest twit of all time. Twenty-one years after the publication of her ground-breaking novel, Fear of Flying, it is still not clear which description is accurate.

But Fear of Fifty, Jong's new book, comes down heavily on the side of twitdom. Phrases like "the most self-pitying commentator since Shere Hite," "egotism gone mad," and "me, me, me, me, me" run through the reader's brain.Of course, I should not be writing these things. As Jong writes cleverly and entirely accurately, the harshest criticism she receives for Fear of Fifty will be from women journalists. "Uncle Tom" women often curry favor with misogynist bosses (women included) by attacking other women. Their vituperation often has the kind of nasty, personal edge that men are simply too busy to develop, Jong says.

Therefore, my pointing out the sheer awfulness of Jong's book is an act of cruelty, damaging to one of the chief celebrants of female sexuality, damaging to female unity, and worst of all, treacherous to a woman whose influence on the lives of young women has been largely to the good. I should admire Fear of Fifty. Failing that, I should shut up about it.

Equally, though, Jong's midlife memoir should have been a good one. If I am letting her down by being true to commonly held standards of quality, then she has let her readers down by her astonishing inability to do what all good writers should be able to do, put herself aside and form some hard-earned insights into the life she has lived.

Fear of Fifty is an unpromising title, leading the reader to expect something like Germaine Greer's book on her own menopause. But there's not actually much in it about turning 50. The book is an autobiography, a rehash of Jong's novels, which for decades she has had the audacity to claim were not strictly autobiographical.

Clearly, they were and we always knew it. Bennett Wing, the silent Chinese psychiatrist in Fear of Flying, was her real-life husband Allan Jong. Gentle, loving younger man Josh Ace in How to Save Your Own Life was gentle, loving real-life Jonathan Fast-until he left her and she trashed him in Parachutes & Kisses. Even her own daughter, Molly Jong-Fast, reappeared in novels as Mandy Wing-Ace.

It's no sin to write about your own life. Although it is for some reason regarded as second-rate to do so, most novelists write from their own experience.

The problem is, of course, that it makes your memoirs pointless. Jong's fiction appears to have been slavishly true to actual events, so much so that whole sections of Fear of Fifty are dull rehashes of her jazzy, overheated novels interspersed with banal New Age aperçus.

For many years, Jong complained she had been pilloried for her love of sex. Women are always punished for lavish sexuality and men are not, she says. True.

On the other hand, what is the humane reader supposed to make of this remark? "Men are very simple creatures. Feed 'em, f-k 'em, but withhold the keys to the castle."

Is it really Jong's intention to become a carbon copy of the most sexually bloated and stupid of male writers? And doesn't she realize that a man who writes such things is automatically regarded as a joke, not as the serious literary figure Jong yearns to be taken for?

Jong lives in a fantasy world. She thinks sex is easy, when for the great mass of unattractive humanity, it is an infrequent and often unsatisfactory act fraught with emotion. It is cruel of her to forget this. For most people, sex is a Very Big Deal.

She thinks infidelity is a given in all marriages, when for most couples it is the equivalent of an underground nuclear test - it causes all kinds of hidden damage and has unforeseen consequences.

She thinks a Third World peasant is better off than a rich American woman because the peasant has a big family to help with the child-minding. She thinks makeup is the Western version of the chador. Erica Jong, an American with a Jag, a Saab and a Mercedes, an East Side apartment and a Connecticut house, a prosperous husband, private airplane, piles of rich downmarket friends with yachts, and a warm sympathy for the Zoe Bairds of this world, actually thinks she is hard done by.

The literary world doesn't respect her. She doesn't get child support. She had to drop her lawsuit against the father of her only child for cramping her literary career (he didn't want her to use Molly's name in a book title). Her ex fired the only really good housekeeper she had. The maid at her rented Italian villa wouldn't wash dishes.

Jong's list of grievances is endless. Worse, she repeatedly makes the weird assertion that she speaks not for herself but for her generation. Possibly she speaks for the self-indulgent and self-obsessed, but no larger group than that, and they're too preoccupied to have a spokesman.

I had always been a confirmed Jong fan. Her first book of poetry was of Atwood quality, and Fear of Flying was marvellous. Jong's heroine was a mess, but candid and brave and she loved sex, the kind of woman who dared to eat a peach, greedily, with the juice dripping onto her dress, even though she knew she'd end up choking on the pit.

The dust jacket photograph of Jong-pretty and happy with blond hair cascading to her waist-didn't hurt either. Jong was the '70s. Everyone wanted to be a libertine, but it all went downhill.

Look at Jong now. Her photograph shows an attractively severe woman in pearls (which I suspect are a satirical touch) with city lights spread out behind her in a panorama of everything she has attempted to encompass in her writing career.

The photo is misleading. The lovely woman she once was has mutated not into an oracle, but into a chronic complainer obsessed with her femaleness. It was jarring recently to flip channels between Canadian theorist Michael Ignatieff talking about the "narcissism of minor difference" and Jong offering sound bites on "women today." Ignatieff's eloquence set off the thinness of Jong's ideas, such as they were.

I keep remembering a well-read, intelligent friend leafing through my copy of How to Save Your Own Life, a Jong novel I liked in a starry-eyed sort of way.

"You do know this is absolutely dreadful, don't you," he said, just checking.

And yes, I did know. I suppose I had known for a long time. Fear of Fifty will not revive Jong. For a writer who began with such panache, it's horribly sad.