In the seventies, Erica Jong taught
women how to fly. Now, with Any Woman's Blues,
she shows them how to land. The protagonist, Leila Sand,
is an artist, mother and world-class celebrity who has a
serious addiction: 'Dart' Donegal her lover, a fatally
handsome narcissist who alternately drives Lela into
orgasm or the bottle. Afraid that giving up the ecstasy,
as well as the pain, will mean losing her creative edge,
she knows too that giving in to it is a sure path to
self-destruction.
Leila's efforts to win back her sanity
and self-respect result in a sensual and spiritual
odyssey that takes her from Alcoholics Anonymous to
violent performance art in a pitch-black New York
nightclub, from glittering parties with SoHo celebrities
to a liaison with a millionaire antique merchant, from
the parlours of Madame Dominatrix to erotic gondola rides
with an irresistible Venetian Cassanova. Along the way,
she learns the Rules of Love, the Twelve Steps, and the
Key to Serenity.
Reviews:
"A very timely and important book...Hilarious...Jong's greatest Heroine."
--Elle
"Any Woman's Blues is a steamy smorgasbord of sexual obsession, drug addiction, alcoholism and self-destruction."
--Chicago Sun-Times
Excerpt:
1
SUGAR IN MY BOWL
I need a little sugar in my bowl,
I need a little hot-dog between my roll.
--J.C. Johnson
I am woman in the grip of an obsession. I sit here by the phone (which may
in fact be out of order) and wait for his call. I listen for the sound of
his motorcycle spraying pebbles on the curving driveway path. I imagine
his body, his mocking mouth on mine, his curving cock, and I am a ruin of
desire and the fight against desire. I don't know which is worse--the desire or the antidesire. Both undo me; both burn me and
reduce me to ash. The Nazis could not have invented a more cunning crematorium. This is my
auto-dafé, my obsession, my addiction.
Friends come to me and urge me to give him up, fill me with reasons, all of which I agree with. They do no good. What I
feel is something that does not respond to reason. Older than Pan and the dark
gods and goddesses lurking in the shadows behind him, this burning I feel
is in fact the primordial force of the universe. Who can explain that I
have chosen to attach it to a blond boy-man who pours his lies in my ear as
he pours his seed in that other place? Who would believe the addiction, the
obsession, the degradation, or even the love? Only one who has felt its fire. Only one who has also been
burned in that fire and whose skin has crackled like the skin of medieval martyrs.
But most women do not have the luxury to feel that fire. Nor, in fact, do I. In my waking life, I am a successful woman
(does it matter for the moment what I do?), known as a tough deal-maker, an eagle-eyed reader
of contracts, a good negotiator. All that I know of life from the other
sphere does me no good whatsoever here. You might even say that it makes
me more vulnerable. For the tougher I am in the lawyer's office, the more
I desire to be tender here where the thought of his cock reduces me to ash.
Let me tell you about his cock. It is clawlike and demonic, a true prong. It has a curve where it should be straight, and in
repose it lists to one side, the left. His politics, if he had any, would be the opposite.
For he is the fascist, the boot in the face, the brute. All men worth having in bed are partly beasts.
Every myth we have tells us this: Pan with his animal legs and human mouth; the beast that Beauty left her father
for; the devil himself, with the wild witches--the bacchantes of
Salem--cavorting about his puckered anus. And kissing it. Part of the lure
is the degradation, the fact that we are creatures born between piss and
shit, and in our darkest moments we obsessively recall that dilemma.
If twenty men were lined up before me with full erections and sacks put over their heads and torsos, I could identify my
love (may I call him that?) by the curve of his cock. Angry and red in erection, circumcised
(not because of his religion but because of the age in which he was born),
curving like a boomerang which always returns to its owner, is it beautiful
only because it leaves me? Is it just because I can possess it merely for
brief interludes that it holds me in such thrall? Would I love it less if
it were there all the time?
No danger of that. For I love a runner. No sooner does he call me his witch, his bacchante, his lady, his love, than he has
to flee.
HarperPaperbacks 1995
362 pages; paperback
0-06-109916-3
Published originally in hardcover
by Harper & Row 1990
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