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"  My dog and I left Ennis, Montana, my home for 20 years, at midnight, September 30, 1982, and drove like banshees to New York City, where we rented an apartment for $400 a month. The highlight of this abode\u2014aside from the wonderful fact that it was located beneath a family of gypsies\u2014was that it possessed dirt floors where my dog, a cattle dog of exceptional beauty (she possessed the face of Diane Keaton) could bury her bones in the living room. Having then unpacked, and donning a pair of banana-colored cowgirl boots, mistress and dog set forth on their first New York adventure. We&amp;#039;d just turned up 44th Street when\u2014we spotted our first New York celebrity! She was a heroine! A witch! A genius! A destroyer of civilization! A castrator! A siren! A blond! She was a woman of such fame and wit, of such wicked literary prowess, that a spotlight seemed to be shining upon her, pouring and spilling down around her like honey as she walked toward us. Was I mistaken? Or did her electric blue eyes twinkle a spark at me? What the hell\u2014I raised my hand and gave her the Girl Scout salute. &amp;quot;We just saw Erica Jong!&amp;quot; I cried, before spinning around to watch the spotlight roll away. You&amp;#039;ve got A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, by Mary Wollstonecraft, published in 1792; A Room of One&amp;#039;s Own, by Virginia Woolf (1929); The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir (1949); The Golden Notebook, by Doris Lessing (1962); and The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan (1963). These books gave women ideas. The book that gave men ideas? Fear of Flying, by Erica Jong, published in 1973. I was at a party (back in Montana) a few months after Jong had thundered onto the literary scene with her &amp;quot;zipless fuck&amp;quot; (a pure one-night stand, no strings attached at all), her terrifying language (nice girls didn&amp;#039;t talk like that), and her delicious heroine, Isadora Wing\u2014who travels to Vienna for an analytic conference with her repressed and depressed (but decent) psychiatrist husband and has to choose between him and a wild, woolly, and far less predictable shrink named, for real, Adrian Goodlove. In short, Isadora, who, like Jong herself, is the daughter of a secular Jewish New York artist mother and a businessman father, has to choose between safety and adventure. Anyway, Fear of Flying was all anyone could talk about at the party, and I recall a young doctor saying to his creamy girlfriend, who was nursing a baby\u2014not his, as it later turned out\u2014on the couch, which had about 15 other people on it: &amp;quot;But you don&amp;#039;t think about sex and running off, like this Jong girl\u2026do you?&amp;quot; The girlfriend looked up at him, raised her eyebrows gaily, and said: &amp;quot;All the time.&amp;quot; And, of course, while Fear of Flying clued men in to the fact that the opposite sex could dig sex just as much as or more than they did, it gave women ideas too. Or at least underlined what we were beginning to know but were afraid to say out loud. Because, as Isadora hilariously hems and haws\u2014and sleeps with her lover, her husband, and, once, both\u2014she sorts through her love-hate relationship with her mother, meditates on German history and Jewishness, makes some jaw-droppingly racist comments, and comes to terms with the signal importance of work in her life. (Her work is writing; Fear of Flying is quite autobiographical, in case you hadn&amp;#039;t guessed.) It was a modern female coming-of-age tale, as gloriously written and trenchant as Philip Roth&amp;#039;s then recently published Portnoy&amp;#039;s Complaint. So the question is always: &amp;quot;Why aren&amp;#039;t books like Fear of Flying being written today?&amp;quot; Or, as ELLE editor Laurie Abraham puts it: &amp;quot;Where are the bawdy, frankly sexual books that are also literary fiction with particular, fleshed-out characters and riffs on big ideas about the influence of culture on an individual life, about the struggle to be true to oneself and an ethical actor in the world?&amp;quot; Bah! Miss Laurie! Genius is unique. You may as well ask where&amp;#039;s the new Jane Austen.  With 27 million copies sold worldwide, Fear of Flying is celebrating its fortieth anniversary this month, and what happier excuse is there for Miss Laurie and I to call upon Miss Erica at her Manhattan apartment? Dear reader, can I tell you that you never saw so many platters of scones, bagels, muffins, exotic buns, fluffy butters, jams, berries, melons, peeled fruits, cheeses\u2014I felt like I was at Pemberley visiting Elizabeth and Darcy at teatime. That is, until Erica, who has enjoyed four husbands, and who knows how to entertain, opened the kitchen door, and\u2014boom! Simone and Colette, her two standard poodles, bounded into the dining room and began making out with us. And now, picture Miss Erica looking extremely fit in sapphire blue, with a jeweled asp clasped round her neck, like Cleopatra. Picture Miss Laurie, charming in a sleek beige sheath, being knocked backward almost off her chair in a poignant embrace with Colette. Picture Doris Lessing. I&amp;#039;m going to copy the Lessing method of shuffling and numbering ideas as we turn on the tape recorder and capture Miss Erica&amp;#039;s thoughts. Shall we begin with the birth of her daughter, the novelist Molly Jong-Fast? 1. You&amp;#039;d never get knocked up if you knew how much pain birth can be. I remember when Molly was born: After nine hours of labor, my doctor says, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m concerned about the baby&amp;#039;s heartbeat. We&amp;#039;re going to the OR and doing a C-section.&amp;quot; I screamed at the doctor: &amp;quot;David! I&amp;#039;m writing the best book of my life! Don&amp;#039;t let me die!&amp;quot; [The book was Fanny: Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones.] We&amp;#039;re going up to the OR in the elevator and it stalls! So I say: &amp;quot;Where&amp;#039;s the technician! We&amp;#039;ve got to get out of here!&amp;quot; And I see this green leg coming through the trapdoor at the top of the elevator, and he says: &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t worry, little lady, we&amp;#039;ll get it fixed.&amp;quot; They wheel me into the OR, give me an epidural, I can vaguely feel the cutting, Jonathan [Fast, her third husband] is taking pictures\u2014so annoying! They hold up the baby, covered with blood, and I say: &amp;quot;Is that the placenta?&amp;quot; Can you believe it? They put the baby next to me, and I see this little face covered with dried blood. I remember what I said: &amp;quot;Welcome, little stranger.&amp;quot; I don&amp;#039;t think I was ever happier in my life than the day after she was born. 2. I forget a lot of things. Like I&amp;#039;ll forget that I said yes to a party. 3. I very much wanted to live life as a lusty human being. I didn&amp;#039;t want to be like Jane Austen, hiding the manuscript under the embroidery hoop, never having a man. When I was growing up as a writer, Sylvia Plath committed suicide. What a waste! She would have gotten over Ted Hughes! She was only 30! 4. I have lots of sports injuries. I was thrown from a horse in Texas. I shattered my tibia on an icy slope in Austria. I was crazy. 5. After the legal battles made it possible to publish [banned books such as Lady Chatterley&amp;#039;s Lover and Lolita] I remember reading Couples, by John Updike, and Portnoy&amp;#039;s Complaint and saying: &amp;quot;Okay, we have a right to do this, but who&amp;#039;s writing it from a woman&amp;#039;s point of view?&amp;quot; And then I said: &amp;quot;Me!&amp;quot; 6. Resentment is the enemy of sex. 7. There was a poet. We&amp;#039;d been writing these incredible erotic letters to each other. He was a poet and a novelist, and British. And when I&amp;#039;m staying at the Ritz in Piccadilly, I meet him in the bar, and he starts talking about how he hates Jews. This was not in any of the letters. 8. I never said it was Ted Hughes! Ted Hughes was such a slut. He wanted to sleep with everybody. He was such a flirt. And he looked like a warlock. He looked like an animal. He was very sexy. 9. So back to the writer at the Ritz: He comes into the room brandishing a condom. We fucked. Without any feeling. I thought if we fucked, I could get him to leave. I ordered breakfast, and he ate very hungrily. You know what I didn&amp;#039;t like? How low and scuzzy he was. You know the cheap wine in the pub? He ordered that, and then came to my room and ordered the good wine and charged it to my publisher. Honestly, I should&amp;#039;ve said: Get out of my room, you anti-Semitic prick. But I didn&amp;#039;t. 10. This is the way I mothered Molly: [Smiling tenderly as Simone lifts Miss Laurie&amp;#039;s skirt, looking for a crumpet.] Absolutely no rules.  11. Forty is the female peak. But it never ends. I had a guy here yesterday helping me hang the art. And he&amp;#039;s wearing two earrings and has a shaved head, and I think: He&amp;#039;s gay. I always assume everybody in New York is gay. And he&amp;#039;s hanging the paintings and starts talking about his girlfriend, and I realize he&amp;#039;s not gay, and I&amp;#039;m looking at him and I&amp;#039;m thinking [plucking a grape and examining it], I could do this, I could do this guy. My husband wouldn&amp;#039;t mind. Ken likes my sexuality. As long as he doesn&amp;#039;t know. He wouldn&amp;#039;t mind. And I&amp;#039;m having these fantasies, and I&amp;#039;m thinking, Okay. Where are we gonna go? Are we gonna go to Hell&amp;#039;s Kitchen? To his dump? And then I think, Oh, come on, it will be a disappointment. And then I think, At least I&amp;#039;m still thinking about it. 12. Ninety-five percent of motherhood is shutting up. 13. I&amp;#039;ve raised hackles. Paul Theroux called me a &amp;quot;mammoth pudenda.&amp;quot; [(Actually, he called Isadora that, but why quibble?)] Martin Amis told me I had no talent. Poor, short Martin Amis who once fucked [bleep]. He didn&amp;#039;t like that women were defining themselves. They got really upset by Fear of Flying in Britain. The female sex was their subject. 14. Mario Vargas Llosa. Him, I would do. 15. Marriage can give you a maison saine. Marriage can give you a place, crops to raise, children, but can it give you excitement? Not all the time. Or not even. If you&amp;#039;re getting in bed with a person saying: &amp;quot;Did you fill up the tank? Did you call the window-blinds man?&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s not romantic. And that&amp;#039;s what most of our marital conversation is about. 16. You can&amp;#039;t sell a book nowadays unless you have a reality show. 17. Blogging? It&amp;#039;s stupid to write for no money. It&amp;#039;s setting a precedent. I say this as past president of the Authors Guild. Writing should be a profession. You can&amp;#039;t give it away. I blogged for Arianna [Huffington&amp;#039;s The Huffington Post] for three years. I thought she was going to take care of us when she sold out. I must have been insane. In London, Arianna is called the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus. Tina [Brown, founder of The Daily Beast] is brilliant. Arianna is venal. But so cute that you can&amp;#039;t resist her. Arianna sold out for $300 million, and she didn&amp;#039;t pay anybody. I said to her: &amp;quot;How can you not pay writers? You are a writer.&amp;quot; You know what she said to me? She said: &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a platform.&amp;quot; 18. But there are many people who don&amp;#039;t read books. I&amp;#039;ll get an e-mail from somebody: &amp;quot;Dear Erica Jong. I love your quotes.&amp;quot; 19. I&amp;#039;m finishing my latest novel, Fear of Dying. It&amp;#039;s about an actress in her sixties who&amp;#039;s outgrown all the parts, but she&amp;#039;s still beautiful and still sexual. She&amp;#039;s married to a much, much older man, who nearly dies. He can&amp;#039;t get an erection because he&amp;#039;s on all these meds. Her mother&amp;#039;s dying, her father&amp;#039;s dying, her dog is dying, her friends are getting cancer\u2014and it&amp;#039;s very funny. And she decides that, in the middle of all this death, she needs a burst of life force. So she puts an ad on the Internet on a site called Zipless, which has been stolen from her old friend Isadora Wing, who makes a cameo in the book: &amp;quot;Happily married woman with extra erotic energy desires happily married man for one afternoon.&amp;quot; [The last glass of wine has been raised, and as Miss Erica accompanies us to the elevator, we pass a giant crate in the hallway, which prompts one more Jongian gem.] 20. I said to my cute art-hanger: &amp;quot;I could make it in an orgone box.&amp;quot; And he said, &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s an orgone box?&amp;quot; I said, &amp;quot;You get in it and you communicate with the different energies. Or you scream. I can&amp;#039;t remember which.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s Wilhelm Reich. It&amp;#039;s not the sensory deprivation tank you float in. I&amp;#039;ve done everything. I&amp;#039;ve also had a succession of water beds in my day.  On Falling In Love &amp;quot;When I set my eyes on Jonathan [my first husband] outside the Beverly Hills Hotel and he was driving a little Triumph, I knew I was going to have a baby with him. I knew when I first looked at him. It&amp;#039;s stupid to know that. Because your brain has to close down to have that thought. If you knew how much work it was or knew how much pain birth could be\u2014you&amp;#039;d never get knocked up!&amp;quot; On Writer&amp;#039;s Block &amp;quot;I get very scared when I start to write: I can&amp;#039;t filter out completely the vicious attacks or I&amp;#039;ll get a panic attack. But then I say, &amp;quot;Okay. It&amp;#039;s just a book.&amp;quot; Right? In so and so many billion years, we&amp;#039;re going to collide with the sun, and it&amp;#039;s just a fucking book.&amp;quot; On the Elusive All-Body Orgasm &amp;quot;If you can really focus on having the most intimate experience possible, you can have an orgasm that proceeds from the chakra below your navel, and you can feel it in your whole body. I don&amp;#039;t think, you know, you can have it with a hook-up, though. Not so easily.&amp;quot; On Sleeping with Married Men &amp;quot;Men care about sex so much more than we do. If you have accepted a man into your body\u2026they love you ever after, even if they may be married to someone else. I did a lot of that when I was single, partly because I didn&amp;#039;t want to get involved. So I fucked a lot of married men because I knew they would not pursue me. But when I ran into them at a party or something, there was this smile, you know? Then if you call them up and say, &amp;quot;Will you help me out with X or Y?&amp;quot; they&amp;#039;re delighted to do it.&amp;quot; On having an open marriage &amp;quot;Well, you know, it was the seventies. We were such hippies.&amp;quot; On the Obamas &amp;quot;I think the Obamas probably have a great sex life. Here&amp;#039;s a couple that really dig each other, and you can see the chemistry. And she&amp;#039;s forever dressing up for him. I think it&amp;#039;s transformational to have that in the White House, actually.&amp;quot; On Porn &amp;quot;Pornography is a real problem. Young women\u2014between 25 and 35 years\u2014tell me the guys they sleep with watch so much online pornography that they&amp;#039;re emptied out by the time they get in bed together. (That&amp;#039;s their theory.)&amp;quot; On writing Fear of Flying &amp;quot;I had moments of laughing madly; I had moments of feeling wonder, and moments of just saying, &amp;quot;Oh my god, I can&amp;#039;t believe I just wrote that.&amp;quot; I had to get it all down before I looked back.&amp;quot; On Passwords &amp;quot;Here&amp;#039;s the bad thing about the Internet: I do not remember passwords. I mean, I don&amp;#039;t even remember my password at the bank. I believe that the first person to figure out the password dilemma will be a gazillionaire. As will the first person who invents a dog toilet that really works.&amp;quot; On Being Well-Read E. Jean: &amp;quot;When people come over, are they stunned by the number of books?&amp;quot; Jong: &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t have those people visiting.&amp;quot; On Living Alone: &amp;quot;I have so many women friends who have discovered how wonderful it is to live on their own. You can paint the house purple. It&amp;#039;s whatever you want it to be. They&amp;#039;ve frightened us to think it&amp;#039;s a fate worse than death, but it&amp;#039;s actually great.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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