Fear of Lying: Erica Jong Speaks
Josie Martin -- July 12, 2006
Mostly I wanted to see how she looked -- pure feminine curiosity. She looks her age. There's no effort to hide it. She looks solid and present. She wore tight jeans and a gauze Indian top in a bit too brightly hued fuchsia, not particularly becoming and certainly not as elegant or glamorous as I'd anticipated.
"Brassy broad" comes to mind, though not when she began to speak. Lots of rings on her fingers, including the big green emerald that she mentions in her latest book, Seducing the Demon. A big turquoise pendant, not a diamond hangs from her neck, and she plays with her soft blond hair every other sentence with hands that look as if she gardens. Her voice is softer than her words, and she's not particularly entertaining nor theatrical. She doesn't act grandiose: she has "longed to do the diva at certain appropriate occasions, but I'm just too short." She can mock herself without any loss of ground.
Erica Jong
She started with the question, "So who is the demon?"
Unsurprisingly, it is whatever keeps us from writing, whether a stern grandmother's voice or a well-known journalist who once wrote her a bad review... it is all the personal foibles that keep you staring at the blank page, and throttle you from telling the truth. On the other hand, her muse is a man, a demon lover who "appears at dusk and is banished by dawn." Erica says that writing gets harder and harder, that each time she finishes a book, she gets scared. Scared that nobody will read it, scared that it will be panned; even when it gets praise she's depressed... scared that someone on the "other coast" will say it isn't enough like Joan Didion's writing. And it is never never good enough!
She feels sorry for beginner writers today because the publishing world has so changed. There isn't anymore an individual respectful relationship between writer and editor from a good publishing house that grooms a young poet as she was patiently groomed after publishing her first prize-winning book of poems. These serious relationships were imbedded in the hope that some good books would follow. Fear of Flying certainly didn't disappoint, but success proved to be as daunting as failure.
Josie Martin
She did not set out to write a "sex book", but it became this phenomena that "allegedly" led an entire generation of young women down the path to promiscuity, degradation, and sluttish immorality. Worst of all, people assumed it was autobiographical and that Isadora Wing was actually the Erica turned inside-out. "It's not even that sexy." Today people read it and ask what was the big deal? A single episode of "Sex and the City" has more sex in it than all of my Fear of Flying, she argues.
She went on at length about writing the truth, "your truth" against the world of lies that we live in. "Everyone lies," she says in as close to a rant as she could bring herself to spew. Our leaders lie, the marketplace lies, agents lie, teachers lie, even your private gurus lie... dealing in false promises of enlightened states as they pass the plate. We live in an utterly corrupt society headed by a "misleader in chief." In a speech to City of New York graduates, she tells them how badly the language has been corrupted. Phrases like "axis of evil" and "9/11 changed everything"... words that are meant to instill those fuzzy feelings of pride and patriotism that prevent clear thinking. For that speech she was booed.
Yet she did not let her talk dissolve into despairing bitterness. She was eager to convey the joys of writing, the absolute commitment to help the creative thrive once you get past the ego and the "must be published demons." She spoke passionately about entering "that flow state," where time and surroundings disappear, where only the words and the hand moving across the page are real. To a question from the audience she responded that the worst thing a writer can do is to worry about the publishability of her work while she's writing. Let it go! "Authors are rogues and ruffians and easy lays," she writes in her book. "They are gluttons for sweets and savories. They devour life and always want more."
One easily imagines it about her, though she makes 60 look great and her new book confirms how good life can be. Up close at the table where I bought a second copy of her Seducing the Demon : Writing for My Life, I really tried not to stare. But the splendid opportunity for one sixty-something post-feminist, to size up this icon, was irresistible. I was inexplicably relieved to see no evidence of fakery. She has not had a face lift, a nose job, nor dental implants. She probably indulges in too many sweets and doesn't effectively hide the middle-age-spread. She looked like the real thing, a well-worn, but still full-of-life woman getting down to the grateful business of signing dozens and dozens of her "tell-all" books before calling it a day.