The author's daughter

Most parents try to shield their children from adult thoughts and desires. But for children of novelists, whose desires are available for public viewing, there's no protection.

By Meg Wolitzer

Mar 11, 2005 | The notion of parents mortifying their children is nothing new. Everyone is familiar with the horrors of, say, one's mother doing the hokeypokey in public, or one's father wearing an orange windbreaker and whistling "A Whiter Shade of Pale" while on carpool duty. But the children of writers are given a mortification all their own. It reaches beyond the hokeypokey and deep into regions unfamiliar to the children of management consultants and travel agents.

In its most common form, the embarrassment occurs when a writer is simply doing his or her job: describing the world in an unflinching, candid manner, and casually borrowing recognizable bits and pieces from real life. Occasionally, a writer borrows much more than that. This was the case with A.A. Milne, who used his son Christopher Robin as a character without asking. The child grew up and was left to languish in bitterness, loathing the father who left him frozen in a kind of twisted, eternal moppethood. It seems clear that writers who use their children to advance their own work are guilty of some kind of unsavory pimping, and that those children -- those trapped-in-amber, beloved figures from picture books and novels -- have a right to feel furious.

But what of the children of writers who neither borrow overtly from real life nor steal their children's souls, but who, along the normal course of their work, write books that include something more mortifying than the image of Christopher Robin in a gender-ambiguous nightdress? What of the children of novelists who dare to write about sex?

I know something about this, having grown up as the child of a fiction writer. When my mother, Hilma Wolitzer, published her first novel, "Ending," in 1974, it featured a scene in which a woman performs oral sex on her dying husband: "I kneeled and made a carpet of our clothing on the floor, and I led him down inside me." After the novel came out, Brian Spiviano went roaring down the ninth-grade hall, shouting, "Read Page 180! Read Page 180!"

By 10 a.m., all the boys in my grade -- boys who never read fiction, and whose reading matter consisted entirely of "Neil Armstrong: A Life" -- had absorbed this sex scene and all its nuances. Their faces were hot with excitement; my own was hot with shame. At the end of the day, when my mother appeared in the white Rambler station wagon to pick me up from school, a few boys lingered near the car wolfishly, sizing her up. I was horrified. Who was this woman who felt at ease not only writing such things, but also, in all likelihood, doing them in real life? Who was this whore?

To a certain extent, my horror was a simple projection of my fantasy of someone finding and reading the quilted and deeply personal journal I kept in a drawer. The fact that my mother was delighted to let the world read over her shoulder was perplexing and even infuriating to someone like me, who still felt uneasy in her skin, and who thought it only right that everyone else should feel that way, too.

Mostly, my mother's fiction was (and is) delicate and funny and only incidentally sexual. But my threshold of tolerance was extremely low. And it wasn't only sex that bothered me; other things did as well. In one of her short stories, she put her protagonist, a young mother, on the side of a bathtub while washing her son's hair, and she had her think to herself, I don't love you, kiddo. How many times had I, when I was younger, sat in the tub with my mother above me on the ledge, pouring water over my Johnson & Johnson-scented head? Was it me she was writing about? For the first time in my life, it occurred to me to question her love. And even though I quickly decided that of course she loved me deeply -- she was wonderfully attentive and caring and expressive -- I never forgot this scene. It made me realize that adults could possess ambivalence and think dark thoughts. It gave me an aperture into adult life, and I was unnerved.

As an adolescent, I jokingly formed an organization called COW (Children of Writers), along with the daughters of a well-known novelist and a poet. We met once or twice over Chinese food to gently mock our parents and then, in a burst of loyal guilt at the end of the evening, to hastily praise them. In the ensuing years, membership has grown, at least in my mind. Recently it occurred to me that Molly Jong-Fast, daughter of Erica Jong, should perhaps be our chapter president (or at the very least our executive treasurer), for the wonderful, fearless "Fear of Flying" is a book that practically taunts its author's child: "Try living with this!"

Next Page: How do writers navigate writing about sex without upsetting their children?

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