About the Author

Erica Jong is the author of nineteen books of poetry, fiction, and memoir, including Fear of Flying, which has more than 18 million copies in print worldwide. Her most recent essays have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, and she is a frequent guest on television talk shows. Currently working on a novel featuring Isadora Wing—the heroine of Fear of Flying—as a woman of a certain age, Erica and her lawyer husband live in New York City and Connecticut. Her daughter, Molly Jong-Fast, is also an author.

Erica Jong left a Ph.D. program at Columbia to write her ground-breaking novel Fear of Flying, published in 1973. Jong is the author of numerous award-winning books of poetry and novels including Fanny, How to Save Your Own Life, Parachutes and Kisses, Any Woman’s Blues, and the forthcoming Sappho’s Leap. She is also the author of the memoir Fear of Fifty. She lives in New York City and Connecticut.

Reviews

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.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

"The job of a writer is to seduce the demons of creativity and make up stories," proclaims novelist Jong, often regarded as one of the most controversial women writers of our time. Best known for her 1973 work Fear of Flying, she has been called everything from a feminist to a pornographer, and her work has left an indelible thumbprint on the landscape of American literature. Now in her sixties, Jong has much to look back on in this memoir: her life and loves (she married four times); sexuality (and its impact on her work); fame (she befriended everyone from Ted Hughes to Henry Miller); gossip (she allegedly had an affair with the now ex of Martha Stewart); and misfortune (she spent time in rehab for alcohol addiction). Though Jong discusses her parents briefly, any real sense of the author's background and the foundation of privilege that allowed her to become a writer is missing. As a result, the memoir lacks the intensity it would have had if Jong had dug into her familial closet a bit more deeply. Still, Fear of Flying has sold more than 18 million copies a testament that people still enjoy reading Jong. Therefore, this memoir is a fine addition to libraries as a complement to the writer's other works. Valeda Dent, Metropolitan New York Lib. Council Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.