I had one of those childhoods that seems cool to other writers, and surely some librarians and academics. One of the literary luminaries I grew up around was Gore Vidal, the famed cultural critic and political pundit. He was brilliant and acerbic and famous for many things, like running for Congress or debating William F. Buckley on television. Vidal understood the power of the medium better than most, and one maxim of his still rings in my ears: There are two things you never turn down: sex and appearing on television.
While I do, in fact, turn down the chance to have sex, perhaps because I’m married and boring, television is another story. Oh, CNN needs me to talk about Elon Musk on Christmas Day? No problem. MSNBC wants me to break down Donald Trump’s legal problems on Yom Kippur? Sure thing! Swing by 30 Rock before dawn? On my way. (Seriously: I write these words still bleary-eyed from a 4:30 a.m. wake-up call for MSNBC’s fittingly titled Way Too Early.)
I’ve written for years—mostly novels, essays—but the requests from cable news bookers ratcheted up during the Trump presidency, the era of peak resistance television. I was tweeting my way through it as well as writing political columns and podcasting, so punditry just fit into the mix. One TV hit begets another, and I’m suddenly a full-fledged member of the cable news commentariat. Even as the Trump news cycle slowed, the requests kept up, and I dutifully hopped on Zoom or raced to the studio to weigh in on the latest political mess, yet another mass shooting, or even a twisted true-crime case or two. Maybe I should be playing harder to get. Though it’s hard to escape my upbringing. The notion that appearing on television is a measure of success may be deeply embedded in my brain.
Author Erica Jong and her daughter, Molly Jong-Fast, in 2011.By Tim Knox.
Some of my earliest memories were sitting in small, stuffy greenrooms in cities that were barely cities. I grew up in the 1980s and ’90s, the era of peak book tour, when successful American writers went from bookshop to bookshop, from local television station to local television station, hawking their tomes. From Chicago to Miami, my mother would travel with a hardcover under her arm and a pen in her pocket. My mother, Erica Jong, was addicted to wine and airplanes. She did write Fear of Flying, so she had some very mixed feelings about airplanes, but Mom loved to travel. She was one of those people who got restless every two weeks and decided she needed to go somewhere to fix her problems. Luckily for her, the years she was famous were the years American publishers loved to send their authors on planes to cities to appear on local television.
No matter how early we’d get to the greenroom, there would always be a half-eaten platter of warm melon sitting on a small coffee table. The room would always smell faintly of hair spray and mildew. This was before the time of cell phones or even Game Boys, so often I would just sit there staring into space or watching my mother on whatever local TV show she was on. Sometimes, there would be other people in the greenroom—agents, friends of other guests, animals from an animal act. Animal acts were really big in those days. We had much lower ideas of entertainment back then.
Writers, or at least the ones I knew, were always desperate to sell their writing. Maybe it was a function of the fleeting nature of fame and my mother being on the wrong side of the famous–normal person continuum, but I always felt like she was desperate to sell her books. In fact, she was often accused of being a relentless self-promoter. But Mom wasn’t the only person in my life desperately selling things on television. Her parents, my grandparents, were frequent fliers on the Home Shopping Network, where they sold their Seymour Mann dolls. Another of my earliest memories is of my grandmother popping in a Betamax tape of herself on TV saying she liked the dolls “because they were like her grandchild but not as rude.”