Fearless, Peerless

Erica Jong's impact on my writing and life.

Photo by Christian Als for Berlingske

On February 5, 1990, I returned exhausted to my university residence hall. Until 10 p.m. in the campus library, I worked on my literary analysis of Sylvia Plath’s “Morning Song.” I turned on the television to unwind and laugh with David Letterman. My ever-partying college roommate was gone and had left the last channel she watched to CBS. The tube opened to Pat Sajak's faltering late-night talk show that would be cancelled two months later.

Across the Wheel of Fortune host sat an elegant and beautiful woman whose hair cascaded over her shoulders in blonde curls. She spoke with a creamy and lyrical voice that projected confidence and immense intelligence. Though I found Sajak lame, the woman was sharp, quick and funny. Her presence stopped me from changing the channel.

Right away I noticed she did not pepper her smooth speech with fillers like “um” and “like.” Eloquent. Steady. She addressed literature, the blues, women and her novel. I don't remember the granular details of Sajak’s interview, but I do remember the woman’s striking red dress. Earlier that summer, she told Sajak, she had worn it as her wedding dress. Sajak concluded his interview by saying the novel’s name (Any Woman’s Blues) and the woman’s — Erica Jong.

I had heard Erica Jong’s name in the past though I don’t recall when or where I had first heard it. I also did not know she was a writer. Hearing and seeing her commanding presence on The Pat Sajak Show show ignited a desire within me to know more about her work and her. But I didn’t completely follow through on fulfilling that desire until the end of my sophomore year. That year I found myself struggling to accept myself and the literary path I always felt drawn to. My grandmother and parents constantly read to me before I entered kindergarten and I loved to write my own tales in my juvenile penmanship.

My passion to read and write creatively intensified every year. By the time I turned 12, I knew I wanted to study English literature and creative writing in college. That Christmas after I received more blank journals and novels from my godmother, I told my parents I wanted to major in English as a college student. That’s when my parents told me studying English literature in college would not guarantee me a steady job afterward.

My parents were high school graduates who had grown-up working class. They were also descendants of Irish, Southern Italian and Swedish immigrants. My own family was working class as well. Practicality was important. Instead of me majoring in English, they suggested journalism. Being 12, I accepted their advice and pursued that path.

But to be honest, when I worked on my high school newspaper years later, despite discovering that I did journalism all right, the same energy didn’t arise in me whenever I read and wrote short stories, poetry and novels. I wanted to create stories, read and be solitary with my literary art. It suited my introversion and right-brain dominance much better.

Still I thought my parents knew best and continued on the journalism path. My parents understood what awaited me in the world if I did not have a college degree that would allow me to write and earn money from the activity I loved and still love to do. I now know they redirected and led me toward journalism out of love. That didn’t change how unsatisfied I felt when I interviewed people and wrote my articles.

By my sophomore year of college, I realized I did not want to be a journalist. I worked on my college’s daily newspaper, and journalism’s daily grind and grit didn’t fit my hypersensitive personality. Decades later a Franciscan Friar with a degree in psychology told me I hit all the marks of a highly sensitive person.

My fellow student journalists were extroverts who found the news life energizing while I found it draining. Even on a college newspaper, practicing journalism worsened my existing clinical depression that had yet to be diagnosed by a doctor. Even though I had discovered feature writing more suited my creativity and sensitivity, I started questioning my life’s purpose.

My college advisor recommended I double major in English at the end of my sophomore year. I didn’t. Why though? I knew that a daily campus newspaper’s demands and the reality of not being able to pay for an extra semester or two of college if I didn’t complete all the second major’s requirements by my expected graduation date. And that made me even more depressed.

I still wanted to write fiction and study the work of other writers. Most of all, I wanted to abandon my journalism major and the daily campus newspaper. Instead I continued studying journalism though the stuck and unsatisfied feelings only intensified. I was afraid of disappointing my parents. Most of all, I was afraid — terrified actually — to follow my bliss like mythologist Joseph Campbell wisely advised people and fail at doing so.

After my sophomore year, I headed one summer weekend to the local library in the conservative town where I had attended a provincial high school. I went to the library’s fiction section to find Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. What caught my eye in the fiction section though was the hardcover edition of Jong’s Fear of Flying. I grabbed it and walked to the checkout desk.

As I waited in the sluggish check-out line, I opened to the novel to its epigraph from Lord Byron’s Don Juan. It was my first time reading Byron.

For all of theirs upon that die is thrown,
And if ‘tis lost, life hath no more to bring
To them but mockeries of the past alone,
And their revenge is as the tiger’s spring,
Deadly, and quick, and crushing; yet as real
Torture is theirs — what they inflict they feel.

They are right; for man, to man so oft unjust
Is always so to women; one sole bond
Awaits them——treachery is all their trust;
Taught to conceal, their bursting hearts despond
Over their idol, till some wealthier lust
Buys them in marriage——and what rests beyond?
A thankless husband——next, a faithless lover——
Then dressing, nursing, praying——and all’s over.

Some take a lover, some take drams or prayers,
Some mind their household, others dissipation,
Some run away, and but exchange their cares,
Losing the advantage of a virtuous station;
Few changes e’er can better their affairs,
Theirs being an unnatural situation,
From the dull palace to the dirty hovel:
Some play the devil, and then write a novel.¹

When I flipped to the first chapter, I did not expect to read “En Route to the Congress of Dreams or the Zipless Fuck.”²

A burning sense of sudden power braided with excitement flickered in my stomach. I had never read such bold writing from a woman before. The soon enflamed braid rose to my face and brain when I read Jong’s first sentence: “There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am Flight to Vienna and I’d been treated by at least six of them.”³ Lost in Jong’s style and her character Isadora’s first-person narration, I didn’t realize it was my turn at the checkout desk until the library worker’s irritated voice shouted, “Next!”

After dinner that night, I finished Fear of Flying’s first chapter while reclining on my parents’ living room couch. I was two pages into the second chapter when my dad entered the room and saw the novel’s cover.

He chuckled.

“Oh. You’re reading that dirty book.”

I knew he was teasing me. My father was a voracious reader and always encouraged my reading. He knew literature’s value. Challenging and banning books did not interest him. Instead those practices angered him. One of the first YA novel’s he gave me was Deenie by Judy Blume.

The further I read Fear of Flying, I found myself embracing not only who I truly was but who I wanted to become: a fiction writer, teacher of English in higher education and a feminist. I decided I would finish earning my journalism degree and then apply to universities where I could focus more on my fiction writing and earn an MFA. Along with developing my literary art, the degree would allow me to teach at a college or university.

Fear of Flying shook my foundation. Having read countless Judy Blume novels in my childhood and adolescence, the female sexuality of Jong’s novel did not shock me. Instead her prose, wit, humanity, humor and feminism peppered with poetry captivated me like her presence on Pat Sajak’s doomed late-night talk show. Fear of Flying’s protagonist Isadora Wing carried no shame for her sexuality, needs, wants and deliverance. Though married and accepting of the institution, Isadora wanted more than what her second husband Bennett Wing, a Freudian analyst, could offer her. But this is literature, so Jong knew that the man Isadora thought could be her ideal “zipless fuck” must be a sexual dud. Therefore, she bestowed him with a name that joined the pantheon of ironic appellations — Adrian Goodlove.

I finished the novel within a week. I didn’t find Fear of Flying a dirty book. I found it literature and art. Jong used symbolism, metaphor, imagery, allusion and a complex plot structure. Jong’s novel deepened my own literature education, In addition to Byron, she exposed me to writers like Anne Sexton, Colette, Doris Lessing and the French feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. I also learned about Philip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus (my father only read and owned Roth’s My Life as a Man) and Bernard Malamud’s The Magic Barrel. She also referenced Plath. Jong’s novel offered me women writers and ideas I had never heard of.

The Fear of Flying chapter that resonates with me is the fourth chapter “Near the Black Forest.” The epigraph this time was not from a poet or writer but Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss who said at his Nuremberg trial that “the continuous burning of bodies [at Auschwitz] permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on”⁴ with many of those exterminated being children.

“Near the Black Forest” opens with Jong’s previously published poem “The 8:29 to Frankfurt.” Midway the verses sing, “My hair’s as Aryan/as anything. /My name is heather./My passport, eyes/ bluer than Bavarians skies./ But he can see / the Star of David / in my navel.”⁵ A Jew like Jong, Isadora finds herself in Heidelberg, Germany 21 years after World War II’s end when the Army stations Bennett there during Vietnam.⁶ Her time in Heidelberg leaves Isadora alone to write her poetry and struggle with the complex feelings of being as a Jewish woman living in the country that inflicted The Holocaust.⁷ Though Isadora notes her family was more pantheist and pagan than practicing Jews⁸, Heidelberg forced a reckoning with her Jewish ethnicity.

After investigating and writing about a Nazi amphitheater the local residents deny and a moral confrontation with her German translator and editor Horst Hummel, Isadora finds herself questioning and facing her own truthfulness in her life and writing:

Even without fascism, I was dishonest. Even without fascism, I censored myself. I refused to let myself write about what really moved me: my violent feelings about Germany, the unhappiness in my marriage, my sexual fantasies, my childhood, my negative feelings about my parents. Even without fascism, honesty was damned hard to come by. Even without fascism, I had pasted imaginary oak-tag patches over certain areas of my life and steadfastly refused to look at them. I decided then that I was not going to be self-righteous with Horst until I had learned to be honest with myself.

Fear dominates Isadora whether she rides on a plane, deals with family, tries to resist the sexist demands and archetypes of the United State or stays truthful with herself and her poetry. Isadora’s identity, upbringing and education like Jong’s were vastly different from mine, but Isadora’s fears lined up with my own. Jong’s novel forced me to be honest with myself and my writing, not feel guilty about my own sexuality, and take control of who I knew I was and who I wanted to become in life.

Jong and Fear of Flying taught me to not let my fears paralyze me and showed me that my truth and wants would not end in tragedy or death. Unlike the literary characters Edna Pontellier of The Awakening, Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary of Madame Bovary, Isadora survives at Fear of Flying’s ending when Bennet finds her in the bathtub after her tragicomic sexual adventure with Goodlove.⁹

Throughout the summer I checked out and read Jong’s early poetry collections Fruits & Vegetables, Half-Lives, and Loveroot and fell in love with her luminous verses and images. Before I returned for my junior year, I read her Fear of Flying follow-up How to Save Your Own Life. Back at my university, I read more of Jong’s work including what is arguably her best novel — the picaresque Fanny, being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones set in 18th century England that she first-person narrated in 18th century English.

In my English classes that focused on women’s literature or advanced academic writing, I analyzed Jong’s work and learned more about her biography. Her publication of The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller opened an opportunity for me to approach her for a phone interview as I worked on my final English essay my senior year of college.

Miller reached out to Jong after Fear of Flying’s publication. Soon they became friends. I read Jong’s mixed memoir-academic critique where in 1993 she noted the political right’s puritanical backlash on sex itself arguing, “If eros is life force then censoring eros is death.”¹⁰ With The Devil at Large she championed the importance of Miller’s and proclaimed he should be taught in U.S. universities. Once I finished reading the book, I wrote my questions and adjusted my final paper’s thesis to focus on Jong and Miller.

To my surprise and delight, she agreed to speak with me on the phone after several faxed handwritten letters to her New York office. Our brief phone session went so well, she offered to continue talking with me that Saturday from her Connecticut weekend home. I became lightheaded when she gave me her home number. We have stayed in contact ever since.

Jong’s past two poetry collections Love Comes First and The World Began with Yes still address love, literature and liberation but now address grief, aging, the internet and technology in the 21st century:

I am a not a bot.

Not a figment of some computer’s dream
created to sway elections.

I am instead a fleshblood creation
the goddess’s typist
tweeting our despair,
trapped between zeros & ones.

Let me out of this hacked computer!
I want to go home!

Kill the bots and their cold computer casings
which never tell the truth & never will.
Give me paper & ink — organic things
that grow the simple flowers of love.¹¹

Too many inside and outside the literary community unfairly see Jong as just the woman who just wrote “that dirty book.” They dismiss or ignore the erudition she earned through decades of reading English and comparative literature and her advanced degrees from Columbia University focusing on 18th century English literature. Her harshest critics ignore the awards she has won, such as the prestigious Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine. She stands alongside other award winners that include Sylvia Plath, Galway Kinnel, Billy Collins, Margaret Atwood, Robert Pinsky, Denise Levertov, W. S. Merwin and Adrienne Rich.

Jong has said numerous times that “The Zipless Fuck” would be engraved on her tombstone despite her collections of poetry, novels and non-fiction like A Letter to the President. The tragedy of her all-too often being simply reduced to her stunning and provocative first novel is that the wisdom, grace, depth and impact of Jong’s writing, accomplishments and Jong herself are too often unfairly diminished. The sexism and misogyny are clear in the literary community’s approach to Jong and her work. Unlike Jong’s work, Philip Roth who wrote Portnoy’s Complaint receives acclaim. In that novel, the protagonist Portnoy masturbates with a liver. Decades later in his novel Sabbath’s Theatre, Roth included a scene of his aging puppeteer masturbating over his lover’s grave. For that novel, Roth won the National Book Award. The Pulitzer Prize board selected Sabbath’s Theater as a finalist.

Because of the United States’ misogynistic puritanism and her honesty and openness about female sexuality, Jong is not often taken seriously or studied by literary scholars like Miller. It has to be noted that while the U.S. fails to honor Jong, other countries do. International readers, scholars and audiences recognize and honor her. Swiss director Kaspar Kasics’s documentary Erica Jong — Breaking the Wall recently screened out of competition at the Locarno Film Festival.

Since reading Jong and realizing to never let fear stop me, I dove head first into the truth of myself and the truth of my life to achieve the goals I had set out for myself during the summer of 1991. I went on to earn an MFA in Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a concentration in fiction writing. My short stories have been published in respected literary journals and won awards. Two of those award include third prize in Playboy’s College Fiction Contest and the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award for National Fiction from George Mason University. By further embracing my truth, The Huffington Post and Women’s Media Center published two of my commentaries. And after four failed attempts, I am now 145 pages into writing my first novel.

I’ve also taught classes in college writing and literature at various Chicago universities and a community college. At the moment, I am tutoring writing at Wilbur Wright College, one of the City Colleges of Chicago. Out of all my teaching jobs, I find tutoring writing to community college students the most emotionally satisfying.

But the greatest test of not letting fear stop me arrived when I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1999. I feared the worst. MS includes depression, and it along with the disease modifying therapies exacerbated my existing clinical depression more difficult. Friends I thought were friends exited my life. Terror, isolation and MS became unwanted companions.

Withdrawing from life and writing too often felt the only choice to survive. To vanquish that ugly feeling, I’d return to Jong’s poetry and prose. Doing so centered me and reminded me to stay fearless. I refused to let fear ever stop me again.

While pregnant with my daughter, I reread her collection Ordinary Miracles. It included poems for her baby daughter who we now know as the political writer, political analyst, journalist, novelist and memoirist Molly Jong-Fast. One poem in particular from Ordinary Miracles that Jong wrote best applies to herself and me: “to be/ a writer/ what you need/ is || something/ to say: || something/ that burns / like a hot coal / in your gut || something / that pounds / like a pump / in your groin || & the courage/ to live / like a wound || that never / heals.” ¹²

Jong told Pejk Malinovski for Denmark’s Louisiana Literature festival that once a writer “become[s] fearless when they can say I am. I am. I know. I think” they can achieve excellence and eminence I don’t think I am a remarkable writer but because of her, I have become fearless toward that aspiration.

Laura Durnell writes Bluestocking Bombshells.

1. Lord Byron, Canto 2, Don Juan, quoted in Erica Jong, Fear of Flying (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973): 1.

2. Erica Jong, Fear of Flying (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), 2.

3. Jong, Fear of Flying, 3.

4. Rudolf Höss, Nuremberg Affidavit, quoted in Jong, Fear of Flying, 56.

5. Erica Mann (Jong), “The 8:29 to Frankfurt,” Beloit Poetry Journal, (Winter 1968/1969), n.p, quoted in Jong, Fear of Flying: 57

6. Jong, Fear of Flying, 61-62

7. Jong, Fear of Flying, 61; 66-68.

8. Jong, Fear of Flying, 61.

9. Jong, Fear of Flying, 340.

10. Erica Jong, The Devil at Large (New York: Turtle Bay Books, 1993), 5-6.

11. Erica Jong, “Not a Bot,” in The World Began with Yes (Pasadena, CA : Red Hen Press, 2018), 70.

12. Erica Jong, “What You Need to Be a Writer,” Ordinary Miracles (New York: Plume, 1983), 45.