Twenty years ago, Erica Jong fell briefly out of love with her face. “There was a moment during my 50s when I’d look at pictures of myself and I would see my father’s aunts staring back at me,” she says, rearranging for the dozenth time her turquoise scarf, a voluminous item whose artful draping requires more or less constant maintenance. “I couldn’t bear it. Oh, my God, I thought. I can’t do this. But I had a friend who lived in Majorca who’d been to see a particular doctor in San Francisco who did facelifts that didn’t look like facelifts. So I decided to get one too. I was very pleased with the result.” She never lied about what she’d done: she has often written of the experience, and it inspires a vivid set piece in her new book, Fear of Dying. But she never went back for more, either. “No. I feel pretty. No one would say I was 40, but so the fuck what?”
At 73, Jong is not, as she puts it, “going quietly”. The TV networks pointedly failed to invite her into their studios to discuss her first novel for more than a decade when it was published in the US last month – “the problem is HD: they don’t want to display women who look like grannies” – and thanks to this, she finds herself boiling with rage, even though a part of her thinks Miley Cyrus is welcome to the Today show and its crummy sofa.
“I’m not surprised. I always said, we’ve only had one third of a [feminist] revolution. But age is the last taboo, and it’s so wrong because, in a weird way, life is just beginning. You’re confident. You’re good at your work. I’ve more imagination now than ever. I’ve come into my own. I’m not afraid of anyone. Yet the media tyrannises us. It’s a consumerist orgy. It’s just not true that men only want little bitty Vogue models with no flesh on their bones. I know it’s not true. Sometimes, I kid with Ken [her fourth husband, a divorce lawyer]. I’ll say ‘Don’t you want a cute young lawyer who knows everything about the bill of rights?’ His reply is always the same: ‘What in God’s name would I talk to her about?’”
Even those husbands who don’t exchange their loyal wives for a younger model are caught up in this consumerist orgy to a degree. Fear of Dying, with its twin themes of ageing and mortality, gently satirises the fact that the sex lives of the middle-aged are now fair game for multinational corporations. “Oh, it’s vile!” Jong all but shouts, warming to her theme. “Those ads! The side-by-side bathtubs. What are they doing?” (The tubs to which she refers – in one is a man, in the other a woman, presumably his wife – appear in a TV advertisement for Cialis, a drug that treats erectile dysfunction.)
“You can’t show them making love. You can only show them in side-by-side bathtubs. This is America. On the one hand, our vulture capitalism; on the other, our puritanism. I find it hysterical. Also, those warnings.” Rushing her words together, she mimics the sound of the advert’s voiceover – “contra-indications include” – with which US drug ads inevitably end. “While-taking-this-drug-you-may-stumble-off-a-cliff-and-die… Ha! But don’t worry, you can still have sex!”
Sure, the sixtysomething heroine of her new novel – to whom you’ll be introduced shortly – is on the hunt for some casual sex even as her older husband recovers from heart surgery. But don’t be misled: Jong thinks we’re all still far too fixated on “the old in-out”, as her friend Anthony Burgess used to call it. “Men are so focused on their goddamn cocks! Whether gay or straight, they think: I am my penis, and if my penis doesn’t stand up, am I worthwhile? But there are a million ways of making love. You can be impotent and still have wonderful sex.”
Jong lives in an apartment high in a tower on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a home that is so close to what I imagined for her, I might as well have stumbled on to a stage set for a biopic of her life. The doorman has a peaked cap; the bell hop wears white gloves; at the end of a lushly carpeted hall, I’m greeted by a beaming assistant. Inside, the rooms are gracious, the views sweeping, the art expensive (above the sofa on which we’re perched, there dangles an Alexander Calder mobile). There are lots of books, and the powder room’s walls are decorated with erotica. The dining room is mirrored, and in the kitchen there toils a maid. Her only company are her two poodles Simone (after de Beauvoir) and Colette (after the author of The Last of Chéri, one of Jong’s favourite books).
Jong herself is all dolled up, her photograph having just been taken. She wears heels and an orangey dress, the colour of which matches her lip gloss; on one finger is an emerald the size of a Subbuteo pitch. When she first became famous, back in the 70s, Jong’s googly eyes and squashy nose turned her into a slightly unlikely sex symbol. But these are the kind of features that wear well, especially when animated by her kind of personality, which is – how to put this? – just a touch self-congratulatory. Not for Jong the false modesty and winning self-deprecation of her British colleagues. Her cleverness, her attractiveness, her sheer brazen talent: fail to note these things and she’ll soon point them out for you. “I was one of those Phi Beta Kappa cum laude people,” she says of Barnard College, where she was an undergraduate.
Still, I can’t help but like her, though admittedly this takes a while. Jong has been famous for so long now. She has a tendency to go into autopilot; at first, she more or less ignores my questions, dusting off instead old anecdotes I’ve read a dozen times before (about Russell Harty, with whom she was unlikely pals as a young woman; about her passion for 18th-century literature; about the time some feminists jeered at her when she read aloud some poems about breastfeeding). But an hour in, and something closer to what I imagine to be the real Jong emerges: a funny, bright, moderately wise, extremely determined person who is as happy talking about Viagra as she is about Alexander Pope. “Oh, I love heroic couplets!” she cries. “I swear to God I do!”
Fear of Dying was supposed to be about an older Isadora Wing, the heroine of Fear of Flying, the novel with which Jong made her name – and how – in 1973. “But the problem was this: I didn’t have the voice, and if you don’t have the voice, you don’t have the book. She had too much baggage. It was just overwhelming.” Wing, then, was relegated to a minor role as the friend of a new heroine, Vanessa Wonderman, an ageing actor whose filthy rich husband, Asher, is adoring but impotent (he is 20 years her senior). Craving “the life force, the fire that goes from loins to navel”, Vanessa posts a small ad on a website, zipless.com – Isadora, remember, once longed to experience the no-strings kind of sex that Jong termed the “zipless fuck” – and thereafter spends several pages trying to dodge the crazies who reply, among them one who requires her to wiggle into a rubber suit (“you bitch,” he hisses, when she refuses). But if Wonderman sounds selfish and needy – this is how she sometimes reads – she has an excuse. Her beloved parents are dying, an unmitigatedly grim business that only increases her desperation not to give in to old age herself.
Jong has always drawn closely on her own life in her novels: too closely, sometimes (in 2008, her sister stood up at an academic conference and announced that Fear of Flying had been a thorn in her flesh for 35 years). This one is no exception. While she was writing it, her parents were dying, and her husband, like Asher, had heart surgery; Vanessa’s career was inspired by Jong’s experience off Broadway, where several years ago she performed for three weeks in Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues (“don’t give up the day job,” said a friend). But she’d also been planning a book like this since for ever.
Long ago, the paperback editor of Fear of Flying suggested to her that there had never been a bestseller about a woman over 40; she longed to remedy that. “I’ve always wanted to write books about women, and for women, that aren’t there yet,” she says. “This novel is about an older woman who still feels that she is beautiful, who still wants love and sex.” She would, however, like to point out that Ken, unlike Asher, is the same age as her. “I made Asher older because I know what happens. I’ve seen it a million times. As you get older, the gap [between you] gets tremendously bigger, not smaller.” Is Ken better now? “He had an amazing recovery. I was scared he would be depressed. That often happens [after heart surgery]. But he came back. He is as funny and clever as ever, and he’s as sexy as ever, too.”
Her parents weren’t, as Vanessa’s are, New York book dealers who had previously worked in Hollywood. But otherwise, the two couples are similar: well-off, loudly loving, Jewish. “I come from an artistic family,” she says. “My father was a musician, and my mother was a painter, as her father was before her: he left Russia at 12, and walked across Europe on foot, which was so fucking brave. I also come from a very long-lived family. My mother was 101 when she died, and my father was 93. He was a health freak. He believed that if he ate kale and never got off the treadmill he would never die. Once, I went to their house – this is in the book – and he was doing jumping jacks. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked. ‘Erica,’ he said, ‘if you go to bed hungry, you’ll live longer.’ He adored me, but he was always critical of my weight. Lose 40 pounds, he used to say. Lose 50!”
Vanessa is devoted to her daughter Glinda, who like Jong’s only child, Molly Jong-Fast, is a recovering drug addict: a flashback scene in which Glinda and Vanessa travel together to a rehab facility in snowy Minnesota seems to be taken absolutely from life. “Yes, but I would never have written it if she hadn’t already done so herself,” she says (Molly, who is now a writer, once published a novel, Normal Girl, about a young woman who is destroying herself with drugs). “She’s been sober for 20 years. She is totally a pillar.” Do she and Molly have a good relationship? Vanessa and Glinda seem a tiny bit tense around each other, and from what I’ve read, Molly, a mother of three, these days plays Saffy to Jong’s Edina. Jong gives a slightly forced laugh. “Yes, that’s the story of my life. But we have a fabulous relationship. Molly is very funny. She’s such a great satirist, and she also writes these things in the Wall Street Journal, like: What It’s Like Having a Mom Who’s the Queen of Sex When You’re a Mom of Three.” With one finger, she adjusts a lock of her curled blond hair. “Oh, yes. Molly will do anything for a laugh.”
Not that Jong is, or ever was, the queen of sex. “I was always monogamous until the relationship was on its last legs,” she says. “Only then did I look around.” Fear of Flying – for all that it allowed the “zipless fuck” to pass into the language, for all that so many women related to its expression of the desire for a certain kind of freedom (John Updike said that it had more “kind words for the male body” than any novel since Fanny Hill) – is not quite the total sex fest those who haven’t read it imagine it to be. When she wrote it, in fact, her publisher told her it was basically Portrait of the Artist… as a young woman, by which he meant that it was a literary novel no one would buy (the only reason Jong didn’t give it that title, she insists, was that she thought it would invite mockery, what with women not really being allowed to call themselves artists). She was told it would sell 3,000 copies at best, and that she shouldn’t expect anything: “So I didn’t.”
Within a year, however, it was a bestseller, and its 29-year-old author an international celebrity (to date, it has sold 27m copies in 43 languages). Far from being thrilled, however, Jong was, or so she claims, scared stiff. At the time, she was a PhD student at Columbia University who wrote poetry in her spare time (she had already published one little-noticed collection, Fruits & Vegetables, which seems to have been – think Esther Rantzen on That’s Life – somewhat explicit). Nothing had prepared her for this. “I went from graduate student to happy hooker,” she says. “Fame in America is terrifying. People were turning up at my house wanting to fuck me; women were ringing my bell and saying ‘I’m leaving my husband and I’m moving in with you’. It was two years until I felt better, but every time I published a new book, it would come out of the woodwork all over again.”
In the mid-80s, when Molly was about seven, Jong did a signing in Los Angeles. “She said: ‘Mommy, there’s a man over there looking at you in a funny way, let’s get out of here.’” Jong, ever professional, continued with the signing. “So this man, who looked like a troll and had pimples all over his face, comes up to me and says: ‘I am the president of the Hung Jury. I wrote to you. We want you to be our mistress of measurements.” She looks at me expectantly. Er, what is the Hung Jury, exactly? Jong rolls her eyes. “It’s a club for men who are very well endowed.” She and Molly made their excuses and left.
Her private life was then almost as extraordinary as her fame, and perhaps helped to stoke her celebrity. Her first husband, “a brilliant medieval historian named Michael” had a psychotic breakdown. “It was terrifying. He started to think he was Jesus and could walk on the water in the Central Park lake.” Jong has, she tells me, a strategy for dealing with crisis, which involves putting one foot in front of the other and simply carrying on. In this instance, however, she went one better, marrying a psychiatrist, Allan Jong, “so nothing bad would ever happen to me because of mental health again”. Unfortunately, Jong, though “smart and ethical and clever”, was rather a quiet type (as her grandfather put it: “He communicates like a telegram, as if words cost money”). At the time – this was in 1966 – they were living in Germany, so he might avoid the draft; she could have used someone a bit more voluble. So she began analysis. It was on the train to see her shrink that she began making notes towards the novel that eventually became Fear of Flying – hence, for those who have read it, all the stuff about German loos. Both these husbands would also appear, thinly disguised, in its pages.
Husband number three was Jonathan Fast, a writer and educator, and the father of Molly. But that marriage, too, failed, and she fought him for custody of Molly, though they’re the best of friends now: “It cost me half a million dollars to keep my daughter in my house. But all of the rancour is over. We spend our holidays together and we talk on the phone, and both Ken and Jonathan walked Molly down the aisle when she got married.”
How did she meet Ken, to whom she has now been married for 26 years? “We were fixed up.” She wasn’t keen to marry again, but she softened when, having complained to Ken two months into their relationship that it was only a matter of time before he tried to censor her writing, he scrawled on a paper napkin the words: “I trust you completely. Do whatever! Write whatever you want! I release you! Ken.” She still has this document, I believe. Their pre-nuptial agreement, however, they burned in a wok 10 years after their marriage. So they’re happy? “Oh, yes. We have had so much fun.” Ken is proud of her writing, which is crucial. It may be the most important thing of all. “I had dinner with Philip Roth long ago, and he’s very clever, but I wouldn’t be with a man like that for all the tea in China. I want to be my own Philip Roth.”
Jong’s assistant appears. Lunch is served. We go into the dining room, where the table is covered with a lavish Indian takeaway. “The restaurant where I got this food is called Agra,” says Jong. “Which I presume means that the people who run it come from Agra.” Her eyes widen in delight at the sight of the paneer and the prawns, the pakora and, later, the pistachio ice-cream. While we eat we talk about feminism past and present. Fear of Flying was, in its way, just as much the product of second-wave feminism as, say, Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, which was published three years before. But its author often attracted the ire of feminists, and she certainly never belonged to the world of consciousness-raising groups and marches on Washington. “[Those 70s feminists] they wanted me to put my dungarees on, and write agitprop and eat pussy, and to say it was better than cock, which was absurd. It was politically incorrect not to be a lesbian. I had an affair with a woman, well, it was just a little overnight fling, and it was silly. Neither of us even enjoyed it. When I look back, it seems ridiculous.”
She used to be upset when people accused her of being an apologist for child-bearing – this is what the crowd shouted about when she read out the “touching” poems about breastfeeding – but now she doesn’t “give a shit… I’ve been a feminist my entire life. I was walking around with [Simone de Beauvoir’s] The Second Sex when I was at high school.”
She thinks women have suffered a “net loss” since the 70s. “We’ve won the right to be eternally exhausted, or that’s what my daughter used to say to me. In the US, we’re still in the past: no creches, no maternity leave, these attacks on Planned Parenthood [Republicans in the Senate keep trying to choke off funds to the not-for-profit organisation]. It’s shocking.” On the plus side, though, there is the “huge resurgence” in feminism among the young, the fact that Hillary Clinton is now beginning to hit her stride (Jong believes she will be the next president), and the rise and rise of Lena Dunham, creator of the HBO series Girls. “I think she’s good. What I praise most in writing is honesty, and she has shown in a very honest way what 20-year-olds are going through in their search for a career and a sex life.”
On and on she goes. Jong is prone to digression. One minute she is talking about gun control, the next about Lyme disease, and the moment after that about the artist Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, possibly the subject of her next novel. Sometimes, it’s hard to follow her. But it’s also impossible not to feel a fuzzy warmth in her presence: her kind of contentment – “writers are never happy, but I am, totally… I am so lucky” – induces, not envy, but a giddy sort of admiration. She loves her life, and why shouldn’t she? And speaking of which, she must now slip into her jeans, and speed off to see her grandchildren. But before she does, she will just sign a special anniversary edition of Fear of Flying for me. “I don’t think it’s my best novel,” she says, peering at the title page. “Fanny [a feminist Fielding-Cleland mash-up of 1980 whose heroine is called Fanny Hackabout-Jones] and Fear of Dying are much better. But I’m still proud of it.” And so, she writes: “Fearlessly, Erica.” Her scrawl is extravagant, bold.
Erica Jong will at the Southbank Centre, London, on 1 November, in partnership with WOW, the Women of the World festival. Fear of Dying is published by Canongate (£16.99). Click here to order a copy for £11.89
