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| Home | Erica Live! | Erica's Events | Erica Jong | Erica's Works | Great Reviews Honesty Flying Erica Jong has more chutzpah in her erogenous zones than most writers have in their In 1972, when Jong was barely 30 years old, her first novel, "Fear of Flying," swept her to fame. Here was a character, Isadora Wing, who had sex, talked about sex, wanted sex, made bad sexual choices and survived to laugh and talk about it. Hers was a woman's voice that had not been heard before. Thirty-four years and 16 books later, time has not mellowed that voice. Her new memoir, "Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life," is political, irreverent, risqué and wonderfully unrepentant. Before we get caught up in the sex - and there's plenty of it: fantasies about Bill Clinton, possibilities with writer Ted Hughes, a one-night stand with Martha Stewart's husband - we must realize that her every book, from "Fear of Flying" to "Fear of Fifty," her every subject, whether witchcraft, Henry Miller or Sappho, is really about the importance of Truth. What shocked her readers in 1972 was her honesty. And although her desires, fantasies and unusual peccadilloes entertain the prurient in us, it is her candor we admire. She might call it fiction, nonfiction or poetry, but her thoughts, words and feelings are deep and real. Jong begins this memoir with her speech to City University of New York graduates. She decided to say what she really thought - about politics, about language, about the state of the world. She talked about our "Misleader in Chief" and how language has been corrupted. "Phrases like 'axis of evil' and '9/11 changed everything' are meant to instill those fuzzy feelings of pride and patriotism that prevent clear thinking." She was unafraid to be booed; she was. Her honesty can make us cringe. The beautiful words of Walt Whitman, "There was a child went forth every day; / And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became," and Jong's equally lovely observation that in reading those words she became "part of the book" are only foreplay to describing a seemingly endless act of oral sex she felt obligated to give an ancient publisher. He'd promised her a fortune for her unwritten first novel. It never happened, but "once you're on your knees it's tough to escape gracefully." We laugh and cry for young Erica. "Seducing the Demon" is peripatetic. Salacious tidbits about sex with famous poets and younger men and women pepper the story. Essays about her daughter, author Molly Jong-Fast, and her time in rehab; about Jong's strained relationship with her mother; about growing up Jewish; Alcoholics Anonymous meetings; an ex-lover delivering a side of beef - get equal time. There's no attempt to rewrite the past. "Authors are rogues and ruffians and easy lays," she says. "They are gluttons for sweets and savories. They devour life and always want more." She tells us how sexy she found Hughes, whose wife, Sylvia Plath, famously committed suicide, and that "only my terror of Sylvia's ghost kept me from being seduced." A few pages later, she says Plath's poems changed her life. "They were unapologetically female. An Amazon wrote them riding bareback. She had cut off one breast and dipped her quill in her blood." Jong also is unapologetically female. Her muse is a man, a demon lover. "He appears at dusk and is banished by dawn. He is part vampire. We long for him to come and drink our blood. Let me show you the fang-marks on my throat." She shows every mark, wart and wrinkle she has and we revel in them with her. We watch her mature in her sexual escapades, from naive and curious to clinically exploring the G-spot and the whole-body orgasm she experiences with her post-heart-attack fourth husband. She makes it sound fantastic to be 60-ish and female. Not a popular point of view, but it's what she believes and that ultimately is what surprises us. I can see this book wrapped as a gift for Mother's Day, birthdays, anniversaries. Women should be talking about this book. Men should be reading this book. We should all try to live up to her standard of self-awareness. Like the delight my great-grandmother (and probably Jong's) felt splashing her arms in the summer heat with the cool water of the Coney Island surf, reading "Seducing the Demon" is mechaye, a pleasure. In the Cockpit With Erica Jong As a writer, Erica Jong has always been endearing and fascinating -- in almost equal parts. Her first novel, "Fear of Flying," with its intrepid, headstrong heroine, Isadora Wing, who longs above all else for a "zipless you-know-what" -- that is, a sexual encounter with no strings attached, just lustful fun and plenty of it -- rocked the literary world and made a couple of generations of hopeful men ask: Is it really true that women are just as absolutely crazy about sex as men are? Isadora was funny and forthright and smart, and so was her creator. As we all know, the novel sold millions of copies, and it marked Jong for life. She became an enthusiastic protegee of Henry Miller and along with him earnestly preached that sex was good and good for you, something like cornflakes. It was an interesting response to traditional American puritanical values and received ideas of literary refinement, but it backed Jong into a philosophical corner: In novels as in life, after hours of strenuous, steamy sex, what can you do as a follow-up that carries the same intensity and excitement? You can't go out and work for the elementary school silent auction. Hemingway managed his narratives by alternating sex with bullfighting and the blowing up of bridges, but what's a girl to do? Figure-skate? Jong tried to solve this problem by writing period novels such as "Fanny: Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones" and "Serenissima: A Novel of Venice" (republished as "Shylock's Daughter"), full of adventure and swagger. They were lustful romps, but there's only so much romping a girl can do, and there was another troublesome aspect to it all: There was very little that was transgressive about any of this sex, nothing mysterious or exotic or forbidden; it was like working out with a medicine ball. I remember once sharing a dais with Jong, who turned out to be an extremely dignified, Nancy-Reagan-thin lady in a beautiful designer suit, still extolling the virtues of the zipless whatever. The disconnect was extraordinary -- and just a little bit nuts. On the other hand, Jong is smart, learned, scholarly, in love with the world of traditional literature. In "Seducing the Demon" she talks about what writing has meant in her own life -- what she has tried to do throughout her long career: speak her own truth, no matter the consequences. The book is divided into an introduction and four chapters, and each segment shows us a different facet of this complex, proselytizing woman. The introduction contains lengthy quotations from a commencement address she delivered after 9/11 to the College of Staten Island of the City University of New York: She fearlessly (or heedlessly) lectured members of the working class (that would be the parents of the graduates) on how the Bush administration was practicing Orwellian doublespeak, deceiving the public and debasing the language: "The Misleader-in-Chief says 'healthy forests' when he means clear-cutting trees, 'clear skies' when he mean pollution. His generals say 'pacify' when they mean killing people, 'collateral damage' when they mean killing foreign civilians. They say 'friendly fire' when they mean killing our own soldiers." Boos, hisses and only medium cheers all around. Nobody likes to be preached to, especially on graduation day. Chapter 1 finds the young author at a leisurely lunch at the Algonquin being propositioned by a reptilian old publisher who has promised her half a million dollars for "Fear of Flying." She ends up performing a dubious sexual favor for him. It's that Isadora Wing voice again -- rowdy, self-deprecating and endearing: How could she have been so gullible and naive? Yet she was the one who sold the book (to someone else) and made a bundle, and now gets to make fun of him in print. She makes even meaner fun of poor old Martha Stewart, whose husband she once seduced at the Frankfurt Book Fair: "I have no idea whether she still goes around telling everyone I ruined her marriage, but I do wish I had the sexual power she attributes to me," Jong remarks, a little disingenuously. Then, in Chapter 2, she's back to preaching. Alcohol is a depressive and bad for writers, she maintains; it's better by far to meditate or take a walk than drink or do drugs to summon the muse (although she writes later about her own fairly recent DUI). Her chapter on Hollywood is, again, self-deprecating and hilarious, but her last, "Does Writing Trump Family?" is where the writer utterly waffles. She writes with pride about her daughter's work (and the girl's former cocaine habit, which seems out of bounds to me). She expresses her sorrow over her father's death, and she confesses her desire to best her mother and sisters. But never once does she address the question of the embarrassment her explicit, autobiographical, sexual writings must have caused her family, her husbands, even her friends. She seems entirely oblivious to her effect on her own personal world. But of course, that is the place where writing trumps family. She's smart enough to know that and exasperating enough to blow the whole thing off. She bets on being so endearing that we won't even notice. The Wall Street Journal Fear of Flying burst onto the 1973 bestseller lists with a heroine, Isadora Wing, who was smart, irreverent and, most important, sexually liberated. Erica Jong’s novel went on to sell some 18 million copies worldwide, and her heroine influenced both serious and pop-culture. Ms. Jong hasn’t had a megasuccess since, but she’s published seven novels, poetry and nonfiction, and her 20th book comes out next week. In Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life, Ms. Jong explores her writing career. At first, Ms. Jong balked at following the advice of her editor at Tarcher/Penguin to write down the stories she’d tell him about her early struggles -- and later, successes -- in life. She felt her experiences were too shocking or inappropriate to print, she says, and she didn’t want to be typecast again as a risqué author. (She had originally planned to write “a series of little meditations,” a kind of daybook for writers, she says.) But in exploring her past, she says “I really got into it, and enjoyed it,” and found a lot of what had happened to be funny. “My mantra has always been: Don’t cut funny.” So she’s telling about “the old lizard publisher who tries to seduce me over rare books,” the British poet who put black garter belts in his letters to her, motherhood, grandmotherhood and her appreciation of writers like Sylvia Plath. Meanwhile, Ms. Jong tells aspiring writers how her daily writing routine helps “pierce the veil of the unconscious” and warns them to be prepared for isolation. On her agenda: another novel about Isadora Wing -- taking her, the 62-year-old author says, to late middle age. Portsmouth Herald Mothers, housewives and working women rushed to buy it decades ago, their teen daughters sneaking it from the bookshelf and devouring it page by page in secret. Grandmothers, hearing of it, flipped through the pages in shock or titillation, sometimes in relief. Husbands read it and learned a few things about their wives. Critics lauded the book for its progressive message or panned it for its so-called shocking sexual passages, no longer so shocking today. Erica Jong’s novel, "Fear of Flying" was published in 1973, just when the women’s movement was coming into its own with Equal Rights marches and demands for economic freedom. Isadora Wing, the book’s heroine, was searching for "herself" as a woman and a sexual human being along with millions of others, millions of women who just didn’t know they could talk about their own inner life. The book opened more than doors for the era’s women, it opened the eyes of the country to what women were thinking. Now, in her new memoir, "Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life" (released nationally from Tarcher/Penguin on March 16 with a special launch party at Jabberwocky Bookshop in Newburyport, Mass.), Jong leads us on another flight to the inner world of a writer who must own up to her past in order to keep writing just as honestly as she did more than 30 years ago. Booklist Ever since Jong made the world snap to attention in 1973 with Fear of Flying, she has made the dynamics of sexual relationships and the status of women the focus of her inventive fiction, poetry, essays, and memoirs. In her latest smart and saucy work of autobiography, she explains how and why she became a writer and what life is like for a woman willing to write about sex. Jong also tells juicy tales of New York and Hollywood; explains why a former Barnard classmate, Martha Stewart, hates her guts; dissects her marriages; confesses to a drinking problem; recounts her writer daughter's bout with drug addiction; shares her delight in her grandson; and pays tribute to Colette, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Simone de Beauvoir. Funny, brazen, and sly, Jong gossips, chronicles moments of personal folly, explicitly recounts sexual escapades, and characterizes her muse as a demon lover. Then, after seducing her readers into attentive submission, she delivers stinging commentary on our society's detrimental disinterest in literature, appetite for didacticism, sexual hypocrisy, and distrust of pleasure. Donna Seaman Kirkus Reviews A zesty, savvy, freewheeling memoir of the writing life, portions of which first appeared in the New York Times Book Review and The Writer magazine. Readers expecting gutsy writing from the author of Fear of Flying (1973) will not be disappointed. Jong vows to tell the truth about herself: her mistakes, her regrets, her divorces, her lawsuits. As she explains it, even the most uncomfortable things she did, she did knowing that she would write about them. She is candid about her addiction to alcohol and her rehab efforts, the time she passed out next to Robert Redford at a dinner party, her night in a Beverly Hills jail for drunk driving and, of course, her sexual encounters. "I kill my enemies with words," she writes, and her rebuttal of Martha Stewart's claim that Jong ruined her marriage is a demonstration of that skill. Her take on Hollywood and the perils of being a novice in the business of turning a novel into a movie could be a book all by itself. As it is, it's a trenchant profile of the late producer Julia Phillips. Her descriptive powers come to the fore in her account of living, loving and working in Venice. From time to time, Jong turns to the art of writing, describing her own character-driven approach to the novel; her techniques for summoning up the muse (or in her case, "seducing the demon" of creativity); and the importance of writing the truth. She also pays tribute to the women poets who influenced her generation, especially Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, who spoke "straight from the female gut." Name-dropping abounds, but not offensively so; it's all part of creating a picture of the world into which Jong was propelled by early fame. Brief stories about her parents' lives suggest another book waiting to be written. If leaving the reader wanting more is the mark of success, then Jong succeeds. Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life "Engaging and amusing." --Publishers Weekly In four discursive essays and an introduction, Jong (Fear of Flying, Any Woman's Blues) ruminates on the elements of her writer's life. Most notable is sexuality: pursuit of the muse has often meant pursuit of a demon lover, a man utterly wrong for her. She walks away from Ted Hughes in the 1970s, but not from many other wrong men. Jong has had four husbands, one child and 20 books in the past four decades. Now in her 60s, she's well-read, well-traveled, therapized, happily married and sexually satisfied. Her memoir in vignettes asserts that without writing, Jong would go crazy, drink well beyond the excesses of her past and be miserable. Writing has propelled her forward into a fulfilled life. There is a fine section on women writers who pursued death (Plath, Sexton, Woolf); Jong explains why she refused to be one of them. These chatty, gossipy essays are just serious enough to count as literary. Jong, however, shrugs off the immense economic privilege that allowed her to write and travel from adolescence and meet famous people who influenced her writing early. She also never explains how she writes. Engaging and amusing, this work is less substantive than it could or should be. (Mar.)
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