In response to Erica’s motherhood essay, Molly wrote that she spends “a ton of time with my children, never travel, barely work and am a helicopter parent like you can’t believe”. Now 32, she married at 25, and had three children – Max, seven, and three-year-old twins, Darwin and Beatrice … Molly writes in the anthology: “In the eyes of Erica Jong, I am a prude … a low-rent yuppie, shuttling my children back and forth to the various and sundry activities and involving myself in the Parents’ Association. I am the person my grandmother and mother would have watched in silent scorn. I sometimes tell my children that my most important job is taking care of them.”
Categories: General
Wow, I feel sorry for Erica Jong. Her daughter comes off as awful in that interview.
I agree the daughter sounds bratty in this interview, but in light of the things her mother has published in widely-read periodicals over the past year or two – her lengthy piece about how ambivalent she has always felt about being her daughter’s mother (published about a year ago), and her nastily insulting and demeaning piece about how women like her daughter overdo motherhood out of fear of sex – I don’t feel sorry for her at all. Maybe Molly is sick of the way Erica uses her in public for self-aggrandizement and thinks it’s mom’s turn for the same treatment. Can you blame her?
Molly seems to me to be a very liberated young woman. Perhaps more so than her mother.