![]() She will be much missed and much mourned. The question arose during the abolition movement in 19th century America: had Margaret Garner destroyed a person or a piece of property? I greatly admired Toni for taking on such a vexing question in American history. She wrote an opera with my friend, Richard Danielpour based on the story of Margaret Garner – a black woman who killed her daughter to prevent her from being a slave. As time went on, Toni and I hung out less and less. I have adopted a similar role for young women writers. She was the great hope of black writers and her job was to make them believe in themselves. I never stopped loving Toni or her writing but she became an icon and I think that was a great responsibility for her. Toni Morrison summed it up when she said, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” In saying that, she echoed my own feelings. We knew that America had to be liberated. We all felt that the women’s story had not yet found its true place in our culture. Of course, there were books about women, but they tended to be mad housewives who committed suicide. The spirit that moved all of us as women writers was a passionate desire to tell the female story. I put away The Man Who Murdered Poets and wrote Fear of Flying. But when Aaron said that, I knew he was right. When somebody criticizes ones voice our normal tendency is to rebel. Anyone will publish that novel but why are you writing in a male voice? Why aren’t you writing in the voice of your poems?” “Because I want you to go home and write a novel in the voice of those amazing poems. He said, “It’s beautifully written but I won’t publish it.” It was a Nabokovian homage about a young man who wanted to kill the greatest poet of his era in order to take on his poetic powers. I had come to him with a novel called The Man Who Murdered Poets. Fear of Flying was also discovered by Aaron Asher in 1973. I was busy publishing my early poetry in 19. I don’t know whether I fully understood it or not but it was on my mothers’ shelf and I grabbed it.Īs I explored my own writing and life, many African American women writers would tell their stories in poetry and prose. In high school, I read Simone de Beauvoir. In 2015 Jong published the sequel to her debut, ‘Fear of Dying’.Įrica Jong was interviewed by Pejk Malinovski in connection with the Louisiana Literature festival in Denmark, August 2016.I had been a feminist all my life, raised by a grandmother who only went to women doctors and dentists and a mother who walked me and my sisters through the art museums of the world pointing out all the paintings women had painted. The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. And the trouble is, if you dont risk anything, you risk even more. The novel was considered controversial due to its portrayal of female sexuality linked to second-wave feminism. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. She has published more than 25 works of both fiction and non-fiction but is perhaps most known for her 1973 novel ‘Fear of Flying’ which has been translated into more than 40 languages and sold over 27 million copies. 1942) is an American novelist, essayist, and poet. In fact it is too much of a strain on credibility to suppose that anyone other than Erica Jong could ever have had anything like this book in mind. Sometimes the predicament has actually happened to me, but I amp it up, and I make it more dramatic because otherwise there’s no story.”Įrica Jong (b. Jong mentions Isac Bashevia Singer as an example of the strength that lies in the ability as a writer to be able to say “I am”, “I think”, “I question”: “When you reach a point as a writer, where you can say ‘I am’, that is the ultimate.” She furthermore feels that a book has to have a problem and that the solving of this problem becomes the plot: “You have to have the main character in a predicament – that’s where you start a book. “They enabled us as North-Americans to embrace that Whitmanic strain in our poetry.” Jong expresses her love of – and inspiration from – the 20th-century South-American poets whom she feels brought surrealism to the Americas, an example of this being Pablo Neruda, who lived in Paris and knew all the French surrealists. “Writers become really great when they become fearless.” Feminist writer Erica Jong here shares what has inspired her writing, and why it is important for writers not to be afraid to turn their own life into a novel. ![]()
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