"All I wanted was to grow up in peace, deal with my bodily changes and these pesky new zits without it being recorded. But my mother was omnipresent, her phone an extension of her arm … every little moment was mined for content."

Writes Shari Franke, "The House of My Mother," quoted in "Is It Abusive to Make Art About Your Children? It’s not quite #MeToo, but a spate of new memoirs is forcing a reckoning on what consent means when your parent is the artist" (NYT).

Shari Franke is the daughter of "mommy vlogger" Ruby Franke, who was ultimately convicted of child abuse. The article also discusses Sally Mann, the photographer we talked about a couple days ago, here.

Mann has her own memoir, in which she concedes, “I wanted attention for the work and the easiest way to get it was obviously to put forward the most attention-grabbing imagery.... To be an artist means you must declare a loyalty to your art form and your vision that runs deeper than almost any other, even sometimes deeper than blood kinship.... When I stepped behind the camera, and they stepped in front of it, I was a photographer, and they were actors and we were making a photograph."

There's this quote from Molly Jong-Fast: "In [my mother's] view, she did spend time with me — in her head, in her writing, in the world she inhabited. I was there. I may have felt that she was slightly allergic to me, but to her, she was spending time with the most important version of me."

By the way, did you know "Christopher Robin Milne resented his father’s use of his likeness in the Winnie the Pooh stories, and Peter Llewelyn Davies, the inspiration for 'Peter Pan,' seemed to live in a permanent state of rage at being associated with the character."

The article is by Parul Sehgal, who writes: "If the child’s perspective goes unacknowledged, and their compliance confused for collaboration, it might be because our focus has so often been elsewhere — on the needs and rights of the artist-parent, on the struggle to have domestic life and, specifically, motherhood, accepted as a subject worthy of study."

That feminist issue has overshadowed the childist perspective. Is "childist" even a word? Actually, yes, but this is the first time I'm thinking of it, and I had to check to see that I wasn't coining it.

"In its various iterations across books and films, the dementia tragedy narrative tells a story of inexorable decline and universal diminishment..."

"... in which the afflicted person steadily vacates her body until she becomes essentially absent. While this process may include moments of lucidity or levity, nothing substantially positive, life-giving or new can emerge for the person or her family and friends — because the person as person is disappearing. 'My mother is just a body now,' Ms. Jong-Fast writes. 'She has dementia. She has breath and hair and pretty blue eyes but Erica Jong the person has left the planet.' She is 'dissolving,' 'slipping away,'  'a faint fragment,' 'an echo,' 'a zombie.' The trouble with this well established approach is not that the tragedy narrative is completely false."

Writes Lynn Casteel Harper — a Baptist minister and the author of "On Vanishing: Mortality, Dementia, and What It Means to Disappear" — in "We May Soon Be Telling a Very Different Kind of Story About Dementia" (NYT).

"Writing about one’s own children has always been a delicate matter. It’s itchy and complicated..."

"... and there is no right way to do it. As a child who was often a subject of the writing of my mother, Erica Jong... I have very mixed feelings about the phenomenon. I like to think I truly hated being written about, but who can remember? Later, I found it gave me a profound lack of shame and no expectation of privacy, which helped me pursue a public-facing career I might otherwise not have...."

Writes Molly Jong-Fast, in "When Your Mom Is Famous for Hating Motherhood/In Heidi Reimer’s novel, 'The Mother Act,' a daughter grapples with being parented (or not) by an actress who happily mines her life for material" (NYT).

"Personally, I have found that there is no solution for having a parent who uses your life for content. There is no salve for the resentment it produces. Would I have been normal had my mom not written about me?... Am I uncomfortable on this planet because I always knew my mom was squirreled away working on a novel in which I would figure prominently, once as twins?"

By the way, Erica Jong is still alive — she's 82 — and Molly Jong-Fast has children of her own — 3 of them.

What was your mom doing when she was squirreled away? Did it make you "uncomfortable on this planet"? Or are we all, always, residents of our mother's planet? In which case, why are you not comfortable in the world you were born into — born out of?

"Sitting across from [Kamala] Harris had me thinking about how I’ve devoted a good deal of my life to analyzing how the media, and Americans more generally, treat powerful women."

Writes Molly Jong-Fast in a Vanity Fair piece with a long title: "KAMALA HARRIS, A VERY TURBULENT YEAR IN AMERICA, AND THE CHALLENGE OF BEING FIRST/In an interview with Vanity Fair, the vice president discusses protecting abortion rights post-Roe and tackling immigration, along with how, as a woman of several firsts—from DA to AG to VP—she hopes to 'create a path and widen the path for others.'"  

It sounds as though, in the middle of the interview, she's ransacking her own mental archive in search of any substance to use in this big Vanity Fair piece she's supposed to write.

And here is the most powerful woman—quite literally one heartbeat away from the presidency....

Oh! The despair in those words! Here you are, given special access, and you don't just trot out the old cliché — "one heartbeat away from the presidency" — you pad it with the ludicrous amplifier "quite literally." I am quite literally rolling on the floor laughing my ass off.

At this point, I am sure Jong-Fast found absolutely nothing of interest in this interview — nothing, that is, that she wanted to use.

"I’ve done 43 Thanksgivings, and the best one was probably in 1997, when I was 19 and getting sober at Hazelden in Center City, Minnesota."

"I’m here to tell you Thanksgiving is terrible, and if you at least spend the time trying to deprogram your niece, you won’t be bored or depressed (though you might be enraged that Fox News or Infowars has convinced her Trump can 'save America' from Joe Biden’s radical agenda of giving people hearing aids and free pre-K). Maybe it won’t work. Maybe you’ll leave Thanksgiving dinner as divided as you were when you sat down at the table five hours and 4,000 calories ago. Or maybe you’ll plant the seed, sow just a little doubt about whatever Tucker Carlson is saying now. Maybe you’ll even change a heart or a mind. Maybe you’ll bring the temperature down just a tiny bit. Or maybe you’ll need to report a relative to the FBI! Either way, it’s something to do besides just eat."

Writes Molly Jong-Fast in "Deprogram your relatives this Thanksgiving/Maybe you’ll change a heart or a mind. Or not! Either way, it’s something to do besides just eat" (The Atlantic).

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone, by the way. I'm only putting this up because it represents a form of writing on the occasion of Thanksgiving that I've seen every year I've blogged — and I've blogged 18 Thanksgivings — but I've noticed there's way less of this theme this year. Maybe something about the lockdown and finally getting out of it convinced editors that hating one's family isn't really where it's at. Not this year anyway. 

So good for Molly Jong-Fast, keeping the stupid old tradition alive. Somebody had to do it, just like somebody has to make turducken.

Speaking of family, not only is her mother Erica Jong, her grandfather is Howard Fast, the author of "Spartacus." Picture them at Thanksgiving, would you? What offensive things might they say? Not passing along bullshit from Fox News, but something else. I'd prefer if Ms. Jong-Fast would dish on her own family, not what's happening at the table of imagined deplorables.

"It’s a normal part of the life cycle for adult children to start parenting their parents. This generational role reversal may be a prelude to the demographic shift to come..."

"... as baby boomers age out of late-late 'middle age' and are forced to relinquish their invincibility, while their children take on the burdens of caring for elderly—yes, elderly—parents. But the pandemic has pressed the issue, putting many people in their thirties and forties in the tense new role of protectors and even scolds. It’s a twisted inverse of the generation gap of the sixties, when young boomers screamed across the table at their parents about Vietnam—except that now we’re telling ours not to leave their homes. The literary agent Lucy Carson pleaded on Twitter, 'Best advice for convincing a diabetic boomer parent to stop commuting into the city? Rage-sobbing into the phone isn’t helping my cause.' At Vogue, Molly Jong-Fast wrote about a similar dynamic with her 'fabulous feminist mother,' the generation-chronicling author Erica Jong. 'I know everyone is going to get mad at me, but this is not about your conflicted feelings about growing older,' Jong-Fast wrote.... A journalist couldn’t convince her parents to ditch their theatre tickets, until the theatre closed and they had no choice.... The writer Robin Wasserman reasoned, 'My theory is that coming of age at the height of the Cold War/nuclear panic inculcated a faith that no matter how scary things look, the Bad Thing never actually happens.'"

From "Convincing Boomer Parents to Take the Coronavirus Seriously" by Michael Schulman (in The New Yorker).

I'm enjoying this Twitter spat between Greg Gutfeld and Molly Jong-Fast (the journalist/daughter of Erica Jong who got the big scoop interview of Lisa Page).

I don’t want to call it too early, but I think @greggutfeld may have the dumbest take on my Lisa Page interview. https://t.co/b9FDjYl1c9

— Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) December 2, 2019

Thats no rebuttal. You’re the recipient of media welfare and the drooling posts after your “scoop” prove it. https://t.co/tXdb6xJ9Jb

— GregGutfeld (@greggutfeld) December 2, 2019

We talked about the interview yesterday, here. I didn't think there was anything in it worth reading. I just was fascinated by Page's calling attention to Trump's imitation of her boyfriend's orgasm. So I'm inclined to believe Gutfeld's "You’re the recipient of media welfare and the drooling posts after your 'scoop' prove it."

And while I'm here and talking about the attention given to the imitation orgasm, let me show you this other tweet from Jong-Fast:

Honestly, I’ve watched that clip a bunch of times and I think at this point it’s done some psychological damage. https://t.co/ZGJVtGngjW

— Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) December 3, 2019

We'd have all forgotten Trump's fake orgasm if Page and Jong-Fast hadn't dug it up and thrust it in our face yesterday. Take some responsibility.

And I think there are quite a few of us who remember having kids who suddenly needed explanations about Bill Clinton having oral sex in the White House.

But the news is the news. Keep your children away from all the news if knowing about the world as it is seems more damaging than protecting them from reality. There are so many things in the news that could hurt a youngster. Hearing a hard-breathing "I love you, I love you" from Trump is close to nothing unless the parent chooses to go graphic about it and explain what adults know. Why couldn't you just say "Oh, he's being silly and exaggerating how these 2 people were so in love with each other"?

I'm giving this my "using children in politics" tag because Hasan and Jong-Fast are just dragging children into view for their own political purposes. It's the desperate old what-about-the-children? plea.

IN THE COMMENTS: Freeman Hunt said:

Windows 10 was popping up little news notifications on our new computer, so when my ten year old logged on to math class this morning, he was greeted with the news that teens tortured a deer and a woman hung her children with a leash. The notifications are now disabled.

I think I can handle explaining Trump's impression.