The job of a writer is to seduce the demons of creativity
and make up stories.
- Erica Jong
The book starts innocently enough - an excerpt of Erica Jong’s speech at the graduation for the College of Staten Island of the City University of New York where she was awarded her first honorary doctorate; and her magnanimous sharing of her 21 rules for aspiring writers:
1. Have faith – not cynicism
2. Dare to dream
3.Take your mind off publication.
4. Write for joy.
5. Get the reader to turn the page.
6. Forget politics (let your real politics shine through)
7. Forget intellect
8. Forget ego
9. Be a beginner
10. Accept change
11. Don’t think your mind needs altering
12. Don’t expect approval for telling the truth
13. Use everything
14. Remember that writing is dangerous if it’s any good
15. Let sex (the body, the physical world) in!
16. Forget critics
17. Tell your truth, not the world’s
18. Remember the earthbound
19. Remember to be wild!
20. Write for the child (in yourself and others)
21. There are no rules
Jong must have taken her own suggestions to heart, especially nos. 13, 15, 17, and 19 as she thereafter goes on a spree narrating sexual encounters (Ted Hughes, husband of Sylvia Plath; a former lover named Dart; an elderly publisher she calls Wagstaff; Andy Stewart, Martha Stewart’s husband; and a poet who wrote her “the sexiest letters full of black garter belts and rosy rumps and black stockings and dirty poems and references to the Story of O”), throwing poisoned arrows at her family members, publisher, and ex-husbands (she is now on her fourth), and dropping nuggets here and there of her forays into same-gender territory.
It’s one thing to hear about the escapades of Isadora Wing (Fear of Flying) or Fanny’s (Fanny: Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones), characters who we have always suspected to be thinly-veiled Jong personas, but it is an entirely another thing to hear in Jong's first person voice her fantasies involving Bill Clinton.
Jong writes that, “For writer as well as other people, ‘integrity of mind’ is the most important attribute. We live in a time when the most exalted lie most blatantly and nobody seems to care. Integrity has become an old-fashioned world”.
But how much can honesty can we take? Which takes us back to Jong’s no. 12 advice: “don’t expect approval for telling the truth”.
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