Erica Jong Web Site: Her works, books, poetry, and life

Sexcapades of the Literati
Literary libertines Edmund White and Erica Jong have long used their own amorous histories in the service of fiction. But now both have new (and newly revelatory) memoirs out. Prompting the entirely academic query: Who’s had a more interesting sex life?

By Boris Kachka
New York Magazine
April 3, 2006

Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life, by Erica Jong
A writing how-to that morphed into a steamy memoir.

Sexual History
The novelist-poet owes her success to the 1973 pro-sex feminist novel, Fear of Flying, which coined (and celebrated) the phrase “the zipless fuck.”

Juiciest Encounter
The best lovers are Italian. “Leonello had a grace that all Don Juans might envy . . . His dancing presaged the grace of his fucking. And he was a slow seducer, slow to bed and slow to finish.” But it didn’t last.

Worst Experience
Definitely an unnamed elderly publisher she calls Wagstaff: “It took him forever to come . . . What was going on in my addled brain? Surely he would give me a first edition -- or two -- in exchange for this . . .?”

Encounters Alluded to in Book
Around seventeen (liberally), including once with her husband while she was imagining Ted Hughes, but never with Ted Hughes himself: “Only my terror of Sylvia’s ghost kept me from being seduced.”

Meditations on Sex and Fame
“I have no idea whether [Martha Stewart] still goes around telling everyone I ruined her marriage, but I do wish I had the sexual power she attributes to me . . . I was just a pawn in a power struggle, a spear-carrier in her opera.”

Theory of Sexuality
“Without adultery, is there no novel? Without sex, is there no poetry? Surely sexual energy and creative energy feed each other. Often they feel the same.”

Erica Jong, author of
Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life