“Lust makes the best of men behave out of character”

Jenny Fields’s expression “Lust makes the best of men behave out of character” encapsulates the sexual argument in her autobiography, A Sexual Suspect. It also becomes a point of conflict with T. S. Garp: Jenny presents desire as a force that can compromise male conduct, while Garp hears her claim as an unwarranted judgment on an experience she has not shared.

Context in Jenny’s Autobiography

The line appears in the autobiography’s chapter on lust, a section that particularly embarrasses Garp. He is already a famous child born out of wedlock; Jenny’s account makes his adolescent desire a public case history as well. What had been private becomes part of the popular story told about him.

The sentence is not presented as an isolated maxim. It belongs to a book that reviewers broadly welcomed, even when more serious journals criticized Jenny’s writing. Some reviewers praised the autobiography for celebrating a woman’s life without sexual attachment, giving the line a place within a larger defense of Jenny’s independence and her choices.

Garp’s Objection

Garp is especially angered by the expression because he believes Jenny lacks the experience to make authoritative claims about lust. He protests that she has never felt it and compares listening to her describe its motives to hearing a plant explain a mammal. His outburst makes the disagreement personal: the book does not merely describe desire but exposes Garp’s private history to readers while giving his mother the final interpretive word.

Helen finds the chapter funny, although she says she does not understand Garp’s attraction to prostitutes. Her reaction contrasts with his embarrassment and anger, showing that the same account of his adolescent need can be treated as comic by one reader and as an affront by its subject.

Meaning and Reception

The expression’s force rests on the contrast between a man’s standing and his behavior under the influence of desire: even the best, Jenny argues, may act against their usual character. Garp rejects not only the generalization but Jenny’s authority to make it. The line therefore concentrates a larger tension in the autobiography’s reception: Jenny’s public voice is celebrated as a defense of women’s independent lives, while her son resents seeing his sexuality converted into evidence for her account of men.