After your parents die, you see it differently.” She describes the forthcoming novel as “a book about what matters….What matters is loving and being loved.” The key to long term happiness, she adds, is having a partner “who understands you better than you understand yourself.” As with many of her earlier books, Dying is about “humor and sadness-that’s my thing.” She later comments, “My humor is the humor of the gallows…of the pogrom.” It is worth noting that she is an expert on satire, having writing a master’s thesis on Alexander Pope. “As you get older, you see your life differently. At seventy-two, with four marriages and twenty-five major publications under her belt, Jong remains passionate about writing-with a new novel, Fear of Dying, due out in 2015.įear of Dying, although fiction, reflects the insights that Jong has acquired during her maturation from feminist icon to doyenne of letters. In Erica Jong’s best-selling 1973 novel, Fear of Flying, narrator Isadora Wing reflects, “No writer can tell the truth about life, namely that it is more interesting than any book.” Maybe that prophesy is self-fulfilling, because over a four-decade literary career as a poet, novelist, memoirist and patron of younger writers, Jong has led a life far larger than much fiction.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |