ERICA JONG: A love affair

As an adolescent Fear of Flying took me over. I couldn't believe there was writing this honest, that people who lived in rambling duplexes with gold leaf ceilings could have major mood swings, that women married to psychoanalysts got depressed and would ride their husbands cocks at night far above the velvety darkness of Central Park in a frenzy of rage, going back to their analysts to talk, to confess, and to get ready to break the rules. Much criticism has been levied against Erica over the years, -- that her novels degenerated into laundry lists and instructions for her nannies, that her sense of her life collapsed the value of her art, that her novels failed to maintain a certain quality of art. I met Erica a few years ago at an event for writers held at Marymount College. It still provoked that adolescent thrill of meeting a celebrity, the author behind the pages that launched over 15 million copies sold and changed lives throughout the world because she had the courage to tell the truth. And she was just as I expected: Sincere, to the point, no nonsense. I was in the middle of a major crisis with my first publisher and didn't feel this was the time or place to go into it. That year I'd met E L Doctorow and a host of other writers who were polite but definitely rushed who scrawled their autographs and bustled off into the effluvium of their own fame. But Erica went slowly. There was a deep look into my eyes, frightened and wearied that my novel would never be published, or if it were, would be hacked into a work of art I wouldn't recognized by an editor who didn't seem to like or get it and rarely returned my calls. She just firmly looked me in the eye, asked me my name, chatted in a down to earth manner, and signed: For David, Without Fear!