Seducing the Demon (25 page)

He is naming the animals and then gleefully dropping the trains on the floor. No sooner do I put the trains together than he picks them up and scatters them on the floor.

“Gold,” he says of the train with the golden load.

“Apples!” he says of the orchard train with its fruit. And then he tries to bite the plastic apples, as if to tell me that he knows what they are.

“Choo-choo train!” he shrieks triumphantly, dropping the red engine, which goes on whirring even though it’s on its back like an insect.

“All done!” he concludes, having wrecked the trains I carefully assembled.

The love of words is clearly in his genes. The story is not over yet.

 

 

 

 

On Sunday,
The New York Times Book Review
called my new book,
Seducing the Demon,
“disheveled” and “trapped in time.” That review wasn’t as scary as the one in the
Chicago Sun-Times,
which called me a delusional car wreck.

Ever since I published
Fear of Flying in
1973, some reviews of my books haven’t just been bad; they’ve been apoplectic—as if I’d committed a crime that had nothing to do with words. Being called a giant pudenda by Paul Theroux still sticks, three decades later.

For most of my career, after reading a bad review I would take to my bed, refuse all calls, drink wine straight from the bottle, eat chocolate cakes, swear off writing and consider going into social work and fantasize about doing bodily harm to critics. I considered hiring a hit man, but since I’ve always pretty much hung out with liberals and eggheads, I never had access to that phone number. So my revenge of choice would be public humiliation. Four inches taller in my black velvet boots, I would splash cold vodka in my critics’ eyes at the PEN gala. Blinded for the evening, they would still see the errors of their ways, repent, fall to their knees, and write letters of retraction.

Yet I never was able to inflict my fantasy. I am neither Gore Vidal nor Camille Paglia—the only two writers who make vitriol both illuminating and entertaining. I have stood face-to-face with my detractors and said nothing but “How are you?” while they shuffled from foot to foot, bracing themselves for a punch or that vodka. Am I cowardly or wise? Wise by default. I know that revenge springs back on the avenger. Also, ever since my prescribed Wellbutrin kicked in, I’m able to be a lot more mellow when I get bad news. What used to be body blows are now slaps. So, instead of seeing the review as a personal vendetta or sexist attack, I’m living with the fact that the critic simply thought my book sucked. So how can I write a better one?

Here’s how. Become less self-centered. One thing my critics, my husband, my daughter and my editor all make fun of me for is my narcissism. How do I get over myself? Being a grandmother helps because it made me realize what a self-absorbed mother I was. The nanny changed my daughter’s diapers. As some kind of penance, I now insist on changing as many of my grandson’s as my daughter and son-in-law will allow.

Besides, I’ve always wanted to improve and evolve as a writer. I’m now writing a novel about my doppelgänger, Isadora Wing, as a woman of a certain age, and I’ve finally, at age sixty-four, gotten to the point where I realize that there are lives and characters more interesting than mine—and Isadora’s. After inhabiting a writer’s mind for decades, I’d like to inhabit the mind of my readers and—god help me—my critics. To love them instead of demanding that they love me.

 

 

 

 

Erica Jong is the author of twenty 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
Elle.
She is 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.

Isadora Wing “returns in triumph”

(
Cosmopolitan
) in this
New York Times
bestseller, a “zipless zinger” (
Kirkus Reviews
) of a follow-up to
Fear of Flying.
Erica Jong—like Isadora Wing, her fictional doppelgänger—was rich and famous, brainy and beautiful, and soaring high with erotica and marijuana in 1977, the year this book was first published. Erica/Isadora is the perfect literary and libidinous guide for those readers who want to learn about—or just be reminded of—the sheer hedonistic innocence of the time.

ISBN 978-1-58542-499-3 (1-58542-499-4)

First published in 1984, here is Erica Jong’s “raunchy, funny, explicit, and outrageous”
(The New York Times)
celebration of boy-toy love. Married (again) and divorced (again), Isadora Wing, Erica Jong’s fictional doppelgänger, is a single parent with an adorable daughter, an irritating ex-husband, and a startlingly handsome suitor, fourteen years her junior. Of course their affair is tortuous and sexy, but is it love? Or is the stud just after a trip to Venice, compliments of a famous author? Jong writes about boy-toy love with “a mixture of eloquence and savage wit as good as anything she has ever written”
(The Wall Street Journal).

ISBN 978-1-58542-500-6 (1-58542-500-1)

In this
New York Times
bestseller, Erica Jong looks to the second half of her life and “goes right to the jugular of the women who lived wildly and vicariously through
Fear of Flying” (Publishers Weekly),
delivering highly entertaining stories and provocative insights on sex, marriage, aging, feminism, and motherhood. “What Jong calls a midlife memoir is a slice of autobiography that ranks in honesty, self-perception and wisdom with [works by] Simone de Beauvoir and Mary McCarthy,” wrote
The Sunday Times
(UK), “although Jong’s memoir of a Jewish American princess is wittier than either.”

ISBN 978-1-58542-524-2 (1-58542-524-9)

First published in 1990, here is a tale of romance, addiction, and narcissism, the three passions of our age. World-famous artist Leila Sand emerged from the sixties and seventies with addictions to drugs and booze. Leila’s latest addiction is to a younger man who leaves her sexually ecstatic but emotionally bereft. The orgasmic frenzies trump the betrayals, so Leila keeps coming back for more in this “steamy smorgasbord of sexual obsession” (
Chicago Sun-Times
).

ISBN 978-1-58542-549-5 (1-58542-549-4)