THE daughter of Erica Jong, author of the sexually explicit 1970s novel Fear of Flying, has exposed the perils of a celebrity childhood in a memoir about growing up in her mother’s eccentric household.

Molly Jong-Fast, 26, went to private school in New York with the supermodel Sophie Dahl and hung out with the children of actors and celebrities.

In The Sex Doctors in the Basement, to be published this spring, she writes for the first time about her friend when they were teenagers.

“There was a time,” Jong-Fast remembered, “when she did not stand larger than most buildings (and) writhe naked for Yves Saint Laurent Opium perfume.” Dahl went on to make her name as a voluptuous, plus-sized model, dated Mick Jagger and has lately shrunk to a gaunt size 8.

Jong-Fast, who describes herself as a spotty, overweight 13-year-old when she first met Dahl, said her friend’s life with her own unconventional mother, Tessa Dahl, seemed impossibly glamorous. Her house was “filled with dried flowers, British cookies, chanting Indian monks, incense and famous people”.

Only later Jong-Fast was to discover that life with Tessa Dahl, the daughter of the celebrated children’s writer Roald Dahl, was troubled.

“I realised that Tessa wasn’t in hotels so she could write. She went to hotels to have an affair with a certain actor . . . I realised Sophie was profoundly sad and that her childhood was very difficult. The Dahls weren’t happy, they were just really rich and really good-looking and really British.”

At Sophie Dahl’s request, Jong-Fast reluctantly excised from her book a reference to Tessa Dahl’s drug addiction. “She said, ‘I really wish you wouldn’t write about that’. I felt that Sophie had been through enough so I agreed.” Jong-Fast was surprised to be asked as Tessa Dahl’s problems with drugs have been aired before. A 1970s wild child who dated actors Peter Sellers and David Hemmings, Tessa Dahl has admitted to sleeping with one of Sophie’s teenage friends and has spent time in and out of drug rehabilitation clinics.

Tessa Dahl once said: “The terrible truth is that when you’re a drug addict, you love the drugs more than anything. I devastated my family, betrayed my children (and) was a lousy mother.”

Jong-Fast said: “Sophie is one of the nicest people alive and very protective of her mother because her mother is not protective of herself . . . She had a much harder childhood than I did.”

In her memoir, Jong-Fast writes about growing up with her mother, who invented the phrase the “zipless f***” in Fear of Flying. As a teenager, she was constantly told that her mother wrote “dirty books” and was horrified by the sex scenes. Jong-Fast also drily records: “When you are 12, there is nothing funny about your mother’s fourth wedding.”

The actress Joan Collins, a friend of her mother’s, once blurted out to the teenage Jong-Fast that she was “too fat”. Collins tried to retract her words, but too late. “Joan should have known that loud, obese 13-year-olds turn into very menacing 24-year-olds with book contracts and Apple laptops,” Jong-Fast writes.

She has wreaked her revenge by describing how Collins asked her to deliver a large, square box to a friend. Although it was tied with string and tape, Jong-Fast peeped inside. “I found a wig in Joan Collins’s box, and that’s when I realised Joan Collins was not all she was cracked up to be.”

Jong-Fast went through a period of drug addiction but cleaned up at 18. She is now married with a young son and often feels more responsible than her mother. Yet her friendships with fellow children of celebrities has persuaded her of the relative merits of her own upbringing.

She remembers hanging out with Starlight, the daughter of the actress and socialite Marisa Berenson, who starred in the film Death in Venice. She claims Starlight would be “swished away” to play with her, while the elegant Berenson lounged by a pool.

Jong-Fast goes on to describe her friendship with the neglected son of a former movie legend, whom she was amazed to see photographed together in a magazine recently.

His mother “looked as if she had adored him his entire life. She looked as if she’d changed his diapers . . . For a second it felt as if maybe his nanny and I were the only people in the entire world who knew the truth.”

The older and wiser Jong-Fast is now firm friends with her own mother. “I learnt that writers are better parents than socialites (and) I learnt that socialites are better parents than movie stars.”

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