What Do Women Want? by Erica Jong Read Free Book Online

smile.
    “Tell her you’re sorry you were such a dreadful mother,” my mother says, her voice dripping with irony. “And apologize. ” I even listen to my mother now.
    “Molly,” I say, “I only did the best I could. I’m sure I made plenty of mistakes. I apologize. ”
    “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” says Molly, impatient. She looks at me with the sheer contempt that is grounded in excessive love. To myself I may sometimes be a four-and-a-half-year-old with ringworm, but to her I am Kali with a necklace of skulls, or the giant statue of Athena that once stood in the Parthenon, or snake-headed Medusa guarding the Golden Fleece. Just wait till you have a daughter, I think. But I am too wise to say it. And my mother and I grin at each other like co-conspirators. Raising a daughter requires superhuman patience. Raising a daughter is definitely tougher than writing.
    I recently published a novel about mothers and daughters. In Inventing Memory, I traced the mother-daughter daisy chain through four generations, showing how we are shaped by both our mothers’ yearnings and our own desperate need to break free of them. The dynamic between these two powerful forces is largely what molds our lives as women. Yes, our fathers and grandfathers matter, but what we learn from our mothers and grandmothers stays in the bone marrow. It surfaces as soon as you become a mother yourself. And what you sow as a daughter, you will inevitably reap as a mother.
    My mother was brilliant in setting me free. Or maybe I was tenacious in demanding my freedom. With mothers and daughters you never really know whose is the initiative. We are so interwoven, so symbiotic, that you cannot always tell the mother from the daughter, the dancer from the dance.
    Of course, I barely understood any of this about my mother and me in my teens or twenties or even thirties. I was locked in mortal combat with her, denouncing her to her face and behind her back, pillorying her in my novels—even as they betrayed my passionate love for her. Of course, I thought I was the first daughter in history to have these tumultuous feelings. Of course, I thought my mother was oblivious of my needs, hypocritical in her life and in her art, and desperately in need of enlightenment by me. I must have been insufferable. But she greeted most of my excesses with love. And it was her love that set me free.
    For how is the gift of freedom bestowed except by love? By never letting me doubt that I was loved, my mother fueled my books, my life, even my own parenting. Though I was fiercely independent and refused to take financial support from my parents after college graduation, I always knew I could go home again. When I wrote painful things about my mother in my novels, she simply said: “I never read your novels, because I consider you a poet first.” I knew I could write whatever I had to write and still be loved.
    My mother had a benign relationship with her mother but a tortured one with her father. He was a brilliant artist, who was a relentless taskmaster to his two painter daughters. And because he considered my mother the more talented of them, he drove her mercilessly. He pushed her so hard that after she married my father, she escaped into the primal pleasure of having babies. By the time her art surfaced again, in middle age, she had three amazons—us—to distract her. It cannot have been easy to go on painting and also mother us all. But she did it. She still paints nearly every day of her life.
    In our house, draftsmanship was held to my grandfather’s relentless standards. You had to draw from life before venturing into the world of the imagination. You had to master charcoal and conté crayon before indulging in color. You had to do hundreds of still lifes before you could draw “the model.” And you had to be able to draw a creditable nude before you dared paint people with clothes on. I found all this regimentation so daunting that I gave up painting. From the age of