Erica Mann Jong (b.1942) is an American novelist and poet. A feminist writer, she has published fiction, collections of poetry, and myriad articles about the lives of women, focusing on stories of sex, love, and adventure.
Born in New York City, Jong graduated from Barnard College (1963.) She is best known for her picaresque novels Fear of Flying (1973,) narrating the adventures of an intense, neurotic New York woman who enjoys a lively sexual experience for two weeks with an existentialist Englishman and Fanny (1980,) written in a pseudo-18th Century style.
Jong’s other novels include Serenissima (1987,) concerning an American movie actress in Venice who is mesmerized as the daughter of Shylock and the friend of Shakespeare, Any Woman’s Blues (1990,) about a woman addicted to sex, and Sappho’s Leap (2003,) a novel imagining the adventures of the Greek poet Sappho. Her poems appear in Fruits and Vegetables (1971,) Half-Lives (1973,) Loveroot (1975,) At the Edge of the Body (1979,) and Ordinary Miracles (1983.)
Jong’s Witches (1981) is a work of nonfiction, investigates the whole concept of the witch, and What Do Women Want? (1998) is an anthology of prose pieces about the changing lives of women in the twentieth century. The Devil at Large: On Henry Miller (1993) is a biographical and critical reassessment of Miller and his works.
Jong’s memoir is Fear of Fifty (1994.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Erica Jong
Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Gossip
There is simply no dignified way for a woman to live alone. Oh, she can get along financially perhaps (though not nearly as well as a man), but emotionally she is never left in peace. Her friends, her family, her fellow workers never let her forget that her husbandlessness, her childlessness—her selfishness, in short—is a reproach to the American way of life.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Women
I was afraid to write “Fear of Flying”; ergo, I had to write it. I have lived my life according to this principle: If I’m afraid of it, then I must do it.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Fear, Anxiety
It takes courage to live a life, any life.
—Erica Jong
I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased to let fear control me. I have accepted fear as a part of life—specifically the fear of change, the fear of the unknown; and I have gone ahead despite the pounding in my heart that says: turn back, turn back, you’ll die if you venture too far.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Acceptance, Perseverance, Anxiety, Moving on, Change, Resolve, Courage, Fear, Endurance
And what is laughter anyway? Changing the angle of vision. That is what you love a friend for: the ability to change your angle of vision, bring back your best self when you feel worst, remind you of your strengths when you feel weak.
—Erica Jong
Perhaps all artists were, in a sense, housewives: tenders of the earth household.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Housework
Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Pregnancy
In a bad marriage, friends are the invisible glue. If we have enough friends, we may go on for years, intending to leave, talking about leaving—instead of actually getting up and leaving.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Friends and Friendship
A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Reading
Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Envy, Principles, Jealousy
To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary. When we take away the right to an individual name, we symbolically take away the right to be an individual. Immigration officials did this to refugees; husbands routinely do it to wives.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Identity, Names
Where is Hollywood located? Chiefly between the ears. In that part of the American brain lately vacated by God.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Hollywood
Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it. … It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Risk, Love, Romance, Risk-taking
Anger is really disappointed hope.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Anger
There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship—only backward. You try to start again but get into blaming over and over. Finally you are both worn out, exhausted, hopeless. Then lawyers are called in to pick clean the corpses. The death has occurred much earlier.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Marriage
I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged … I had poems which were rewritten so many times I suspect it was just a way of avoiding sending them out.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Endurance, Resolve, Perseverance
Show me a woman who doesn’t feel guilty and I’ll show you a man.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Men
No one to blame! That was why most people led lives they hated, with people they hated. How wonderful to have someone to blame! How wonderful to live with one’s nemesis! You may be miserable, but you feel forever in the right. You may be fragmented, but you feel absolved of all the blame for it. Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Blame, Responsibility, Self-reliance, Being True to Yourself, Confidence
Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Feminism
Friends love misery, in fact. Sometimes, especially if we are too lucky or too successful or too pretty, our misery is the only thing that endears us to our friends.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Money, Misery
Isn’t that the problem? That women have been swindled for centuries into substituting adornment for love, fashion (as it were) for passion? All the cosmetics names seemed obscenely obvious to me in their promises of sexual bliss. They were all firming or uplifting or invigorating. They made you tingle. Or glow. Or feel young. They were prepared with hormones or placentas or royal jelly. All the juice and joy missing in the lives of these women were to be supplied by the contents of jars and bottles. No wonder they would spend twenty dollars for an ounce of face makeup or thirty for a half-ounce of hormone cream. What price bliss? What price sexual ecstasy?
—Erica Jong
Topics: Women
Solitude is un-American.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Solitude, America
Bigamy is having one husband too many. Monogamy is the same.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Marriage
Back in the days when men were hunters and chest beaters and women spent their whole lives worrying about pregnancy or dying in childbirth, they often had to be taken against their will. Men complained that women were cold, unresponsive, frigid. They wanted their women wanton. They wanted their women wild. Now women were finally learning to be wanton and wild—and what happened?. The men wilted.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Pregnancy, Sex
It takes courage to lead a life. Any life.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Danger, Courage, Risk
Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy gets the Catholic Church. America gets Hollywood.
—Erica Jong
I know some good marriages—marriages where both people are just trying to get through their days by helping each other, being good to each other.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Kindness, Giving, Service
Men and women, women and men; it will never work.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Men, Women, Men & Women
Men have always detested women’s gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared.
—Erica Jong
Topics: Gossip
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