Washington Life Magazine
Washington Life Magazine

Fearless Jong

From best sellers to booze, sex and demons in between (including Martha Stewart)

Erica Jong holding nothing back at Nathans.

When Erica Jong first published her best-selling book, Fear of Flying, over 30 years ago, it was clear she was not afraid to speak her mind. After a string of successful novels and memoirs, Jong proves that point again In Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life (Tarcher, March 2006) which poignantly chronicles her professional career and its toll on her personal life. In a recent Q & A Café interview with WL contributor Carol Joynt, Jong holds nothing back.

Carol Joynt: Why don't you start by answering this question: How do we pronounce your name?
Erica Jong:
(Zhong). When I was very young I had a schizophrenic first husband and I thought that the cure was to immediately marry a psychiatrist So I married a Chinese-American doctor named Allen Jong and published under that name but people see me and think I am Dutch.

CJ: And you're married now to?
EJ:
Kenneth David Burrows. Erica Jong had become a brand. I loathe and despise the fact that writers are branded, but there it was – you sell a lot of books and you're a brand.

CJ: You must be a very proud that your daughter is also a writer. There was a while when she was a child in crisis and you didn't know what was going to happen.
EJ:
She grew up too fast in Manhattan and went to private school where all the kids had credit cards. There were a lot of drugs and Prada. That's, all I'm going to say about it because it's her story not mine.

CJ: Even though she did take one of your stories?
EJ:
She takes a lot of my stories but it's okay for a daughter to take her mother's stories, but not okay for a mother to take her daughter's stories. I would not have written about Molly's graduation from Hazelton if she had not written about it first.

CJ: What would you have done differently, looking back and talking about all the forces that may have conspired to make her life challenging. Would you have not sent her to private school? How could you have raised her differently than you did?
EJ:
Well I really couldn't because I was divorced when she was four. My former husband, her biological dad, Bio-Dad as we call him, was very bitter and kept suing me for custody, and dragging me into court hoping to cost me as much money as possible. I just wanted peace at any price, but he was very angry. We've [since] made peace.

CJ: Why did you write this book?
EJ:
For 15 years I have had in my computer for a book of advice for writers with all kinds of interesting stuff… Don't expect approval for telling the truth. Use everything. Remember that writing is dangerous if it's any good. Forget critics. Remember to be earthbound, and wild. Write for the charm in yourself and others.

CJ: Those are good points. Have they all served you?
EJ:
They were really the rules I made up for myself when I was totally blocked and couldn't write. The book was meant to be a series of meditations for young writers. As I began to put together all of these pieces I'd been working on for many years, my editor kept saying to me, “but 58 what these young writers really want to know is, how did you do it? You had a huge bestseller when you were very young and usually that stops people cold and they can't do anything after that.” I began writing little stories about the toughest things I went through after Fear of Flying was published. All my old friends from high school and college hated me and would go out of the way to say horrible things about me.

CJ: But that's just early on. That didn't endure.
EJ:
[It] endured for enough time to affect me. I realized you lose a lot of friends when you get successful, but you gain new friends.

CJ: You write quite elegantly about the price of fame – you think you're getting into it because you get good tables at restaurants, but then you find out that there is a good side and a bad side. They don't teach you how to be famous…
EJ:
No, there is no course, although I could give one. [laughter] . So I began writing these anecdotes and I wrote about the old lizardy publisher who seduced me in his office…

CJ: That was at the Algonquin, right?
EJ:
Right.

CJ: Good place to be seduced by lizardy old publishers.
EJ:
They always do that. I told the story about going to the Frankfurt Book Fair where hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe, and falling into bed with a man, who was not only my publisher, which was really dumb, but was married to a woman who is not a good enemy to have… Martha Stewart… [laughter].

CJ: While you were known for sexual frankness in literature, you say that it is almost silly now to go back and read some of the books that were shocking then. Your books were sort of a vanguard of a new kind of frankness…
EJ:
Because the law changed. Those of us who are old enough to remember that when we were in college we couldn't get John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Unless you went to the rare book room, they were locked up. You couldn't get Tropic of Cancer unless you went to Paris. Then the law changed.

CJ: You've said that sex is everywhere in the media, but ecstasy is absent. Does literature take part of the blame for that?
EJ:
I don't think literature ever gets the blame. Exploring yourself through reading and learning about how other people live is never a negative. It's part of our growth process.

CJ: Was it our liberation that caused that?
EJ:
Our liberation in the 1970's was about women being entitled to sexual fantasies… We were not thinking about little girls giving [oral sex] all over middle school, pleased with themselves because it's something they can do that boys get off on. These girls are not experiencing any sexual satisfaction. So is that the triumph of feminism? No, it's about control. Girls have learned that this is the way you can control boys. This seems to be a strange perversion of the 1970's revolution.

CJ: What are the secrets to writing sex in literature?
EJ:
Being honest. Very often, like the anecdote I tell about the old publisher who takes me up to this little office to show me the first edition of Leaves of Grass and somehow I find myself on my knees. Be honest because human beings are very self deluding creatures. We lie to ourselves most of the time. We lie to ourselves a lot in the bedroom. We want something out of sex other than ecstasy at times and the only way to write about sex is to write about it as a human interaction where often you are lying to yourself or the other person is lying to himself.

CJ: Apart from your own writing, have you been reading other authors?
EJ:
Phillip Roth does it so well it blows my mind. One of his most unpleasant books, Sabboth Theatre has a repellent hero. He stays over at a friend's house and he goes through the wife's lingerie to turn himself on. This guy is the houseguest from Hell – people hated the book because the main character is so repellent when he comes to the Mexican cleaning woman and she says, “No, Sir, five Children's,” and he had her bend over the bed, which she's making. Ok. This is writing about the craziness of human sexuality and people will read it and probably think Phillip [Roth] did that– [but] I doubt it. Although I'm sure he's done a lot of other things. Good sexual writing is about the human aspect and people who are self destructive, as we all can be sexually. It's easy to write about bad sex because you can be funny but good sex – tantric sex, the joining of two souls, as I write about in my new book Seducing the Demon –is really hard to write about because you sound Christian or a terribly boring guru.

CJ: When you know you have a sex scene coming up is that particularly traumatic for you?
EJ:
Well you usually get turned on writing it.

CJ: You write, “Without sex there is no poetry,” and “Without adultery there is no novel.”
EJ:
The French say without adultery there is no novel. I did make up that the “news screws.” There is an aspect of creativity and sexuality that are alive. The muse for a woman is a demon lover. But I'm speaking metaphorically, not literally.

CJ: What are your demons, since that is what you are seducing in your book?
EJ:
My main demon is creativity. I need to write and sometimes writing is very dangerous. If you write honestly you can alienate your entire family, your spouse, your best friend, all the people you depend on.

CJ: You've never been able to be anything but who you are. That comes across. You've tried acting. You wrote about bi-sexuality. That wasn't who you are. You've tried being a drunk and that wasn't who you are. You keep coming back to who you want to be, don't you?
EJ:
That's really true. And the older I get, the more I know who I really want to be.

CJ: You have said open marriages are a crock.
EJ:
Well, you know in the 1970's we all tried open marriages. Many of us did. Jonathan and I tried open marriage…[before that] I was married to Alan Johns and he didn't think we had an open marriage. He thought he was in a normal cheating marriage. [laughter] and that he was cheating without telling me, in the old-fashioned way,…adultery. He didn't tell me until years later when he was really mad at me.

CJ: When did you realize you had a drinking problem? I gather that at some point it was Robert Redford who may have caused your sobriety?
EJ:
I was seated at a dinner party at the Brokaw's next to Robert Redford. They tried to fix me up with him and I was so terrified to be sitting next to a movie star that I drank four glasses of wine in rapid succession and passed out. Such are the delights of fame. I realized that when I was anxious, I tend to overdo.

CJ: Do you still drink?
EJ:
I occasionally drink wine.

CJ: You say that working out is an antidepressant, but you also say writing is an antidepressant.
EJ:
If I don't write, after a while I start to feel like a lunatic. I get anxious. I was given a certain talent and if I don't use it I start to feel a little nuts.

The Q&A Café at Nathans in Georgetown is open to everyone. For more information please visit www.nathansgeorgetown.com Located at the corner of Wisconsin and M Street.



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