Erica Jong

BIO

Erica Jong is the author of eight novels including FEAR OF FLYING, FANNY, BEING THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE ADVENTURES OF FANNY HACKABOUT-JONES, SHYLOCK'S DAUGHTER (formerly titled SERENISSIMA), a novel of Venice, and INVENTING MEMORY, a novel of mothers and daughters. Several of her novels have been worldwide bestsellers. Her other books include the nonfiction works, FEAR OF FIFty: A Midlife Memoir, THE DEVIL AT LARGE, a study of Henry Miller, WITCHES, WHAT DO WOMEN WANT?, and six volumes of poetry.

FEAR OF FLYING, which was first published in 1973, is about to be re-issued in a 30th anniversary edition. In print in 27 languages, this modern classic has sold seven million copies in the US alone, with worldwide figures reaching approximately 12 million.

Erica Jong's novel, SAPPHO'S LEAP, an odyssey about the greatest lyric singer of all time, is set in the ancient world. It was published by W.W. Norton in May 2003. Her two other historical novels, Fanny and Shylock's Daughter, will also be reissued by Norton with Reading Group guides. A musical production of Fanny is currently in preparation at the Manhattan Theatre Club.

In 1998, Erica Jong was honored with the United Nations Award for Excellence in Literature. In addition, she received Poetry magazine's Bess Hokin Prize for her poetry and the Deauville Award for Literary Excellence in France. In Italy, she received the Sigmund Freud Award for Literature in 1975. Her works have appeared all over the world and are as popular in Eastern Europe, Japan, China, and Asia as they have been in the United States and Western Europe.

Erica Jong has taught literature and writing at The University of Maryland's Overseas Division, The City University of New York, The 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, The Breadloaf Writers Conference in Middlebury, Vermont, The Salzburg Seminar in Salzburg, Austria, Ben Gurion University in Beersheva, Israel, and Bennington College.

A graduate of Barnard College and Columbia University's Graduate Faculties where she studied 18th Century English Literature, Erica Jong also attended Columbia' graduate writing program where she studied poetry with Stanley Kunitz and Mark Strand. She has lectured and read her work all over the world.

Erica Jong lives in New York City and Weston, Connecticut.

AUTHOR TALK

May 2003

In this conversation with the groundbreaking author of FEAR OF FLYING, Erica Jong discusses her new novel, SAPPHO'S LEAP, and reveals her thoughts on the state of feminism in today's society.

Q: What drew you to write about Sappho, the first and greatest Greek female lyric poet?

EJ: The power of Sappho's words, most of which describe erotic love, have inspired overs and poets for 2600 years. After re-reading her in my fifties, I thought, "Here's the voice of a woman coming to us down through history, yet her lyrics describe feelings that are totally modern." When you read them, you realize that women in the past were just like women today.

Q: Tell us something about Sappho's immense fame.

EJ: Sappho comes from a time in which the oral tradition was only beginning to give way to the written. She was a brilliant performer and when she sang, people fell under her spell. She was really like the great female pop icons of today. Sappho's songs were learned by other singers and performed throughout the ancient world. She was widely heralded and imitated. Plato called Sappho the "tenth muse. Sappho's ability to transfix an audience with her words and music was part of what I wanted to evoke in my novel.

Q: What was the genesis of your new novel, SAPPHO'S LEAP?

EJ: Many legends have circulated about Sappho. The most famous is that she threw herself off a cliff for the sake of unrequited love for a handsome young ferryman who jilted her. This makes no sense to me in terms of the other things that we know about her life. For example, she wrote these beautiful bisexual love poems. Why would she have killed herself for a man?

What if Sappho had just toyed with this youth and she was the one with the power? I imagined her as a headstrong young girl who got involved in political intrigues, fell in love with the handsome rebel poet Alcaeus, and then was married off to a drunken old husband to keep her out of trouble. What if Sappho then became a kind of female Odysseus, who crisscrossed the ancient world, had many adventures, and was a passionate survivor? What if the real end of the story was that Sappho had a dalliance with a young man, but she was the one who dropped him, not the other way around? Using Sappho's surviving fragments, the few biographical markers, all of them disputed, my own reinvention of archaic Greece, and the songs, epics, and histories of her contemporaries, I began to recreate Sappho as the greatest singer of all time.

Q: You draw on age-old myths ­-- of gods and goddesses, Centaurs, Amazon women, and the realm of Hades ­-- to weave Sappho's odyssey. Why are myths valuable?

EJ: Myths are the psychological history of a people; a way of talking about the things in our lives that are most powerful --- fear of death, jealousy, passion, the fickleness of love, and the desire for control. They provide a kind of shorthand for the emotional life of the human race.

Q: In your novel, you have Sappho and Aesop become close friends who share many adventures together. Why was that an important relationship to create?

EJ: I think that the purest relationships are friendships. One of the things that's changed between men and women in the last thirty years is that they are able to be good friends. In SAPPHO'S LEAP, as long as Aesop and Sappho are on the brink, as long as their love is unrequited, they are able to nurture each other. It is only after jealousy comes in that their relationship is damaged.

Q: As you discussed earlier, legend has it that Sappho committed suicide. You chose to give her story a different twist. Why was that?

EJ: Whenever we look at exceptional women in history, we always discover some tragic obstacle that foiled them. I think the myth of Sappho's suicide is exactly that. Here was a woman whose reputation was vast, who was quoted and re-written by other singers, who was unforgettable, whose fragments have informed love songs --­ even to this day. It seemed to me that the myth of Sappho's suicide was a way to diminish her achievement.

Q: What is one of the contemporary issues that you address in SAPPHO'S LEAP?

EJ: Feminists of the second wave really believed that if only we could create a female utopia of flawless Amazons who were perfect in ruling the world, everything would be fine. There would be no more war. I wanted to play with utopian ideas and send them up. That's why my Amazons in SAPPHO'S LEAP are under the influence of a ruthless female ruler who has taken their ideals of democracy and perverted them. As a result, they've turned the tables on men in a very cruel way.

Q: What do you see as Sappho's legacy?

EJ: Every woman writer who has written unflinchingly of her life owes her honesty in part to Sappho. Her words have reverberated down the centuries. There is something very powerful about her images that makes them unforgettable.

Q: Could you address the following maxims from SAPPHO'S LEAP:

Words are immortal. Flesh is not. As an author, how do you feel about that statement and the incredible power of the written word?

EJ: We hope that it is true. Obviously, any writer writes because of death pursuing her. You feel that your life is transitory but perhaps your words will not be. Maybe that's the delusion of writers. I've found quotes from my work all over the Internet. Always taken out of context. Used in ways that I had no intention of them being used. That is a kind of immortality.

No woman can understand her mother until she becomes a mother. How much did you draw on your relationship with your daughter to write about Sappho's?

EJ: Being the mother of a daughter has been the most important thing in the world to me. It has made me look at my life in a totally different way. The fear of losing your child is probably one of the most potent for women. In writing of that relationship, my deep, unconscious fear of loss came out.

Women don't know where their own interests lie. A sorry lot we are, always fighting among ourselves for men's praise. Does that still hold true today?

EJ: We've never really solved the problem of women uniting. We have immense power. If we didn't dissipate it with this kind of competition, we could use it. If we could unite politically, we could really save our own lives. One of the saddest things is that women have not joined forces to fight for our own rights. That's why we still don't have reproductive choice. We don't have childcare. We don't have paid parental leave. Many of the things that are important to us are very low priorities of our government because we haven't banded together to demand them.

Marriage and death were not so dissimilar in those days. Do you view marriage as a death sentence for a woman's creativity and sexuality?

EJ: The greatest thing that's happened for women in the contemporary world is that marriage is no longer a death sentence. The most optimistic thing that I see about marriages today is that young men and women share responsibilities much more than their parents did. Child rearing is viewed as a joint role. That's very hopeful.

Q: Your groundbreaking first novel, FEAR OF FLYING, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, has sold 7 million copies in the U.S. alone. Why do you think this book still resonates with readers today? Are things really that different now than 30 years ago?

EJ: What I hear from the young women who read the book for the first time is that the conflicts that Isadora faces are still the ones that they face. How do you balance love and work? How do you find a man who's really trustworthy? How do you make peace between your sexual and intellectual drives? FEAR OF FLYING depicted a woman trying to come of age and looking to make those decisions for herself. Who is she going to be? Is she going to be a mother? Is she going to be a writer? How will she combine the two? Those conflicts still resonate with women today.

Q: You were at the barricades of the sexual revolution of the late sixties and early seventies. What are some of the major changes/similarities between then and now?

EJ: In the late fifties, early sixties, women tended to marry their first lover. So, there were many starter marriages that later came apart. Now, men and women are much more egalitarian. When I look at my daughter and her friends, I see much more openness about sex. Men and women live together before they get married. That's a major change.

However, we still have a lot of work to do. People who have no interest in equality have captured feminist language. Commercial interests see something valuable in exploiting young women in order to sell them products. Women are being duped into thinking that freedom is having tattoos and walking around half-dressed. It's not about that. It's about having political power, which we don't have yet.

Q: What do you see as the state of feminism today?

EJ: Clearly we're in the midst of an unfinished revolution. We need another push in the women's movement and it's got to come from a new and younger contingent. Many women today don't know that abortion was ever illegal. They need to understand their own history and wake up to the danger that lies ahead. I'm afraid that Rowe v. Wade may have to be overturned before women realize what dire straits their mothers were in and why they fought so hard for change.

Q: A theatrical production of your novel, FANNY, is currently in preparation at the Manhattan Theatre Club. Tell us something about that project.

EJ: This is the culmination of a decade of trying to take my five-hundred page novel, FANNY, Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones, and turn it into a musical. We've had a lot of fun with this project. It's set in the mid-eighteenth century and is very much about female strength and power. The music is written by Lucy Simon, with lyrics by Susan Birkenhead.

Q: What are you hoping to achieve with SAPPHO'S LEAP?

EJ: I'm trying to look at the whole of female history as a way of enabling women to seize their lives with power and passion.


(c) Copyright 2003, Erica Jong. All rights reserved

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