When I was young and trying to figure out the world, I sometimes emulated the characters in the novels I’d read, often with disasterous results. My favorite author at the time was Erica Jong. Jong’s second novel, How to Save Your Own Life, starts with what to me is still a compelling sentence: “I left my husband on Thanksgiving Day.”
Famous feminist poet Isadora Wing is the heroine in HTSYOL and several other Jong novels. I loved everything about Isadora. Her energy. Her fame. Her poetry. Her courage. I wanted to be her, wanted to leave my husband, wanted to banish my bland marriage, wanted to save myself from an inert suburban existence. And while I was at it, I also wanted to be a famous feminist poet.
This ended up, as you might imagine, causing me a lot of trouble.
Recovery literature explains that children of alcoholics learn what normal is by reading cues from the world around them. I, unfortunately, took my cues from the novels of Erica Jong. In that way, I was a bit of a modern Emma Bovary. Luckily, I escaped Emma’s dismal end, but not without hurting a lot of people I loved, including, maybe most especially, myself.
The irony here is that I took Jong’s tongue-in-cheek novel as gospel. In an interview later, Jong said she came up with the “How To” title because so many women wrote to her after Fear of Flying asking for advice on how to change their lives. In truth, Jong had no answers. All she had was a brave heroine who made as many mistakes as everyone else did. Maybe more.
Now that I write fiction (the famous poet thing never panned out), I understand that the solutions protagonists use to extricate themselves from their problems only serve to dig them in deeper. That’s what makes it interesting fiction. And needless to say the exact opposite of model behavior. Which is where I am right now with Eve. She is really making a mess of things, much as I did when I was young, and it pains me to take this journey with her.