Washington Post Book World Interview

Washington Post Book World, February 9, 1997

The Author as Lover

_{There are books that mark genius
and books that shift gears. There are writers that plumb
hearts and those who find doors. Erica Jong may not be
listed in the Oxford Companion to American Literature,
but she will long be remembered by baby boomers as the
woman who shifted the gears and threw open the door to a
full frontal view of contemporary female sexuality in
fiction. When Jong's edgy Isadora Wing (Fear of Flying)
burst on to the sex-crazed, drug-hazed culture of the
early '70s, she led the way to a new kind of American
heroin--the carnal obsessive. The queen of the
"zipless" heat.}

_{Jong grew up New York City, the
second daughter of a painter and a musician. Her mother
was a portrait artist whose parents had emigrated from
Russia; her father a songwriter who turned businessman in
order to support the various generations that inhabited
their West Side apartment.}

_{"We had all the problems of a
New York Jewish intellectual family," she recalls,
referring to that singular mix of Manhattan neurosis and
fizz. "It was hard to get a word in at the dinner
table. When I first saw Woody Allen's Hannah and Her
Sisters, I thought he writing about me.'}

_{She attended New York's public
High School of Music and Art in the '50s, filling her
notebooks with sketches and poetry, and reading her work
out loud to anyone at home who would listen. Her
favorite childhood book at 12 was Frances Hodgson
Burnett's The Little Princess, a Victorian novel
about a little girl shut in a garret. "After that, a
rush of Russian novels, with no particular emotional
equipment in place to understand them."}

_{She studied writing at Barnard and
18th century English literature at Columbia,
"reading novels like bonbons" and combing
poetry with Robert Pack, Stanley Kunitz and Mark Strand.
By the time she was working on her PhD, she had produced
two books of poetry, Fruits & Vegetables and Halflives.
"I was such an academic, I don't recognize
myself when I look back. I knew exactly how to write
tedious, footnoted tomes, and never suspected I would do
anything else."}

_{But in the late '60s she tried her
hand at a novel. "It was after I'd read some
Nabokav. My story was about a male poet who sets out to
kill his doppelganger."}

_{Aaron Asher, an editor at Holt,
read it and offered his advice. "'Someone will
probably publish this,' he said. 'I don't want to. Some
day you'll thank me for it.'}

_{"And then he said another
thing: 'That female voice in your poems. Why isn't it in
this novel?'}

_{"It was my Aha moment, as if
a wind had come m behind me, pushing. I began to
think--John Updike had written Couples, Henry
Miller had Published Tropic of Cancer, Roth had
done Portnoy's Complaint--males were writing about
the bedroom. Why not women? Why not me? But we were still
undiscovered country--no one had written about what goes
on in a woman's head with any nakedness, and by the time
I shelved the first manuscript and went off and finished
the new one, I had decided no one would want to publish
it."}

_{Asher did. At first, Fear of
Fling was received as a literary feat. Updike
reviewed it in the New Yorker. Henry Miller wrote about
it elsewhere. And then, when it was published in
paperback, the book's dynamics changed entirely.
"There was a media frenzy. A scandal. Here was this
young woman coming out of nowhere to talk about sex. And
she had blond hair... The book became a bestseller for
extraliterary reasons. I felt exposed, traumatized.}

_{Jong has produced numerous books
since, but none with the impact of Fear of Flying.
The two Isadora sequels--How to Save Your Own Life
(1977) and Parachutes and Kisses (1984)--never
quite reached the greater public's consciousness. But
Jong has been tireless in production. To date she has
published six volumes of poetry and six novels (among
them, Fanny, Being the True History of the
Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones (1980) and Any
Woman's Blues (1990). Her seventh novel, the
multigenerational saga Inventing Memory, will be
released in June. She has written nonfiction as well: The
Devil at Large, about her friendship with Henry
Miller, and Fear of Fifty, her mid-life memoir
about what she calls the Whiplash Generation--women
raised to be Doris Day, wanting to be Gloria Steinem, and
raising their daughters in the retrograde age of Princess
Di and Madonna.}

_{"I'm always asked in seminars
to stand for contemporary womanhood," she
says. And I'm glad to do it. I like being a mentor. She
marvels at current bestsellers like The Rules,
which counsels young women to lure marriage partners by
appearing demure and naďve. "It's as if they've
just discovered flirting. Here's a generation that grew
up on Oprah--describing every aspect of their lives on
national TV-- and then they have to be told not to give
their secrets away on the first date. Pretty amusing,
eh?"}

_{-Marie Arana-Ward}

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