Fear of Fifty
Erica Jong
Language: English
Pages: 352
ISBN: 1585425249
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Seducing the Demon has introduced Erica Jong to readers who hadn't been born when Fear of Flying was published in 1973. Now one of her finest works of nonfiction -and a New York Times bestseller-is back in print with a new afterword.
In Fear of Fifty, a New York Times bestseller when first published in 1994, Erica Jong looks to the second half of her life and "goes right to the jugular of the women who lived wildly and vicariously through Fear of Flying" (Publishers Weekly), delivering highly entertaining stories and provocative insights on sex, marriage, aging, feminism, and motherhood. "What Jong calls a midlife memoir is a slice of autobiography that ranks in honesty, self-perception and wisdom with [works by] Simone de Beauvoir and Mary McCarthy," wrote the Sunday Times (U.K.). "Although Jong's memoir of a Jewish American princess is wittier than either."
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Man the late Harrison Salisbury who invited me. The company included Studs Terkel, Susan Sontag, Robert Bly, Gwendolyn Brooks, Irving and Jean Stone. Voznesensky was promised, but did not appear. Many apparatchiks did. We went by rail from Moscow to Kiev. I was horrified at the way Gwendolyn Brooks’s black face provoked frank stares in Moscow and Kiev. She was my roommate on the train and we stayed up all night, talking poetry and motherhood. Why did Venice follow this trip? It was because of.
Tossed. There is great appreciation—even love—from readers. But to get to them, I find I must run a kind of gauntlet. It is precisely this mockery, ridicule, and humiliation that makes women tremble at the presumption of leadership (or authorship). The hatred is so great, the anger so unforgiving, the self-loathing so bottomless. What is the crime? Daring to have opinions? Daring to be exuberant, sexual, funny, opinionated, excessive? If you doubt these things are seen as criminal, look at the.
Sisters, you are truly the most powerful generation that ever lived. But it hasn’t saved you. The generation that didn’t trust anyone over thirty is turning fifty at the rate of seventy-seven million a year. I wrote Fear of Fifty because I felt in my gut that turning fifty was going to be the crucible for me and the boomers. Turning fifty means you are going to do the unthinkable—become old and unhip—and that changes everything. I am not quite a boomer. I am a war baby, born a little before the.
The winter of her death, there had been a page of her poems in The New Yorker. I’d read them, but I was not yet ready to absorb them. Still imitating Keats, Pope, and Fielding, still mimicking the male poets of my Barnard and Columbia education, I did not yet realize how much I hungered for those poems. When the poet is ready, the muse appears. In Germany, I was ready. Plath’s poems cut me open. Blood spurted onto the page. Suddenly I realized that I could abandon my neutered poems about.
Escape from the prison of our own false self”—Merton again. He was describing the search for the contemplative life. But writing also requires the contemplative life. Psychoanalysis is dismissed today as elitist, sexist, and self-indulgent. I disagree. How can you love yourself as a woman if you are looking at yourself through a wall of knives? And how can you love your sister if you think those knives are made of steel rather than of your own fear? As women we need to know ourselves more than.