If I could interview Donald Trump, this is what I'd ask him
Writer Molly Jong-Fast is best known for being a commentator on US politics. She is also the daughter of Erica Jong, the author of the 1970s feminist tome Fear of Flying. Here, the 46-year-old discusses the important men in her life, including her grandfather, Howard Fast, who wrote Spartacus.
My paternal grandfather, Howard Fast, wrote Spartacus as well as 80 other published books. One of my favourite things about him was that he was smart and disciplined. He would wake up at 5am and you'd hear the typewriter going. He was very much a product of the Charles Dickens' paid-by-the-word kind of writing.
He went to prison for three months in 1950 for his communist beliefs. In his memoir, he said everything that was bad about him – like cheating on my grandmother, Bette, a sculptor, with whom I was very close – was not in his FBI file.
My father Jonathan, a writer and later a social-work professor, and my mother Erica Jong [author of Fear of Flying ], were introduced by my grandfather. They moved from California to Connecticut, where I was born. When I was three, they had a bad divorce. My mother moved out and left me with the nanny. After that, I'd see Dad every other weekend. Then, a year later, I went to live with Mom in New York.
I am like my father as we both have red hair. We both get motion sickness and both have big feet.
I was a bad teenager and very entitled. Drugs, drinking and blacking out were my focus at high school in the Bronx. I got along with boys OK. I wasn't uncomfortable, but I wasn't super comfortable either.
My first celebrity crush was Jay McInerney. I was in that generation that thought he and the literary brat-pack that also included Bret Easton Ellis were the coolest.
Mom married four times and had numerous fiancés. She looked for someone to save her, and to get her out of her own head. I kept meeting these men and thinking they were going to be my father and then they were not. I liked some of them better than the ones she ended up with.
I am the daughter and granddaughter of alcoholics. But I am so different to my mom because I got sober when I was 19, and so I didn't ever have to be, or didn't want to be, her.
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They married in autumn 1996 and had a daughter, Sailor, but the marriage unravelled when it emerged that Cook had been having an affair with a teenager he met in a toyshop. 'How did I not see all this? How did I not know?' she says. Loading It was later revealed that Cook had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars visiting internet pornography sites. He had also shared explicit videos and images of himself on the internet while searching for more girls. 'How did I ever get involved with this person?' Brinkley says. 'You really feel stupid and then you try to learn from it, so you're not quite as stupid next time.' Brinkley turned 71 this year. 'When I started out, 30 was a number to fear,' she says. 'They said to me, 'You'll be chewed up and spat out by the time you're 30. It will all be over.'' They were, needless to say, completely wrong.
