Though I was only three when it was published, and thus exempt from most of the societal upheavals that it described, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying nonetheless occupied a reasonably significant role in my coming of age. I’d always heard rumors of its outrageous salaciousness, but when I finally got around to reading it–sometime in college–I was perplexed; to my mind there was far too little sex and far too much explication of the evils of Freudian therapy (why didn’t the heroine just get a nice female therapist, I wondered). Still, its reckless honesty and minute detailing of bodily functions unnerved me sufficiently to keep me reading. I’ve retained a certain irked curiosity about Jong ever since, picking up her other novels when I see them selling for cheap in secondhand stores. When I heard that she was coming to town to push Fear of Fifty, her rather exiguous new autobiography, I wasn’t going to miss it.
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Arriving at Women & Children First bookstore for Jong’s reading, I feel like I’ve blundered into one of my mother’s bridge parties. With the exception of a few women in their 20s and 30s (“I started that book years ago and never finished it,” one says to her friend. “Yeah, but she’s a big name, you know,” the friend replies) the salt-and-pepper-haired crowd is here to be titillated and validated once more by the girl who showed them, 20 years ago, that their secret urges and angers were shared. Jong plays amusingly to her audience; she’s there, she explains, to tell them that she–and they, by extension–are “generational pioneers.”
Not one to let her generation be crowded out by the trendier boomers and X-ers, Jong has coined a term to sum it up: the “whiplash generation,” in which, according to the promotional materials for her book, she’s a “charter member.” (By the way, I’m putting together a charter for generation Y, the “young twentysomething” generation; anyone under 25 who’d like to become a charter member can contact me c/o this newspaper.)
My experiences, your experiences. Jong’s bland self-absorption, her confidence that the long limousine, because it is in her heart, is also in the hearts of her audience–that she is their “generational pioneer”–is as much her trademark as her vaunted honesty. When she talks about Fear of Fifty, both traits come on display. “This book was a tremendous liberating experience for me,” she says, “and, I think, for the people that have read it.” It’s a book that has “enormous passion,” she explains, “a very funny book” that just came “bubbling out of me.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Nigel Parry.
