Erica Jong at home in the Upper East side, New York.
Photograph: Mike McGregor 

INTERVIEW

Erica Jong: 'There are a million ways of making love…'

This article is more than 9 years old

Her frank 1973 bestseller Fear of Flying brought fame and notoriety. Now, with her first novel in 10 years, Erica Jong turns the focus on sex and the over-60s

Rachel Cooke

Sunday 25 October 2015

Twenty years ago, Erica Jong fell briefly out of love with her face. “There was a moment during my 50s when I’d look at pictures of myself and I would see my father’s aunts staring back at me,” she says, rearranging for the dozenth time her turquoise scarf, a voluminous item whose artful draping requires more or less constant maintenance. “I couldn’t bear it. Oh, my God, I thought. I can’t do this. But I had a friend who lived in Majorca who’d been to see a particular doctor in San Francisco who did facelifts that didn’t look like facelifts. So I decided to get one too. I was very pleased with the result.” She never lied about what she’d done: she has often written of the experience, and it inspires a vivid set piece in her new book, Fear of Dying. But she never went back for more, either. “No. I feel pretty. No one would say I was 40, but so the fuck what?”

Fear of Flying still soars above tabloid outrage

 

Fear of Flying still soars above tabloid outrage

This article is more than 9 years old

The indignation that greeted Radio 4’s adaptation of Erica Jong’s feminist classic is testament to an unflinching gaze on life and gender that still has the power to shock

Sian Caín
Friday 26 February 2016

“RADIO 4-LETTER” was the Sun’s headline earlier this week as it raged at BBC Radio 4 and its feminist series Riot Girls, for the week-long broadcast of a reading of Erica Jong’s 1973 novel Fear of Flying. After objectifying women on page 3 for, say, 45 years, the Sun decided that Radio 4 had somehow lowered the tone. Listeners were apparently “furious”, the paper declared, noting that “Ofcom confirmed they had received one complaint.” Huh.

 

(Viking)

Molly Jong-Fast’s memoir about her famous mom is sad, dishy and relatable

In “How to Lose Your Mother,” Jong-Fast lays bare a terrible time in her life, when she put her mother, the writer Erica Jong, into a memory-care facility.

May 28, 2025

Review by Martha McPhee

 

Erica Jong (left) with her daughter Molly Jong-Fast at a book signing of Jong-Fast’s novel Normal Girl, in New York, 2000. 

Photograph: Barbara Alper

REVIEW

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR

How to Lose Your Mother by Molly Jong-Fast review – Erica Jong’s daughter on the worst year of her life

In this frank, exposing memoir, Jong-Fast reflects on her dysfunctional upbringing as her family falls apart

Fiona Sturges

Thursday 19 June 2025

 

With Simone and Colette.Credit...Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York 

How Erica Jong, Writer, Spends Her Sundays

What gets this best-selling novelist going? Cappuccinos, movies with her grandchildren and her go-to notebook.

By Julia Bozzone

• Sept. 24, 2022

Erica Jong used to spend Sundays in her Connecticut home with her husband, Ken Burrows, a lawyer, but in recent years, the weekend commute became more of an ordeal for the couple. (She is 80, he is 81.) These days, they are living full time in their apartment on the Upper East Side, with their two black standard poodles, Simone and Colette.

 

Erica Jong with her 10-month-old poodles Simone, left, and Collette. Jong has sold 20 million copies of her novel ’Fear of Flying.’ (Melanie Burford/for The Washington Post)

‘Fear of Flying’ author Erica Jong zips along 40 years after dropping her literary bombshell

Berlusconi Tucker

7 October 2013

Sure, you got your stories that deliver your pop-culture one-liners. You got your “Make my day,” or “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse,” or your ironic “Vote for Pedro.”

Rarer is the phrase that catches some of the zeitgeist and holds it there, beating and alive, in its tiny little word count. Here resides "Greed is good" from the cash-obsessed late 1980s; "Big Brother," from the late 1940s fear of totalitarian regimes; and "Catch-22," from the authorities-are-idiots 1960s. (Note irony to today's headlines!)

David Foster Wallace's Top Ten List

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Reader Bio

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist who was known for his sprawling, innovative novels that moved beyond postmodern irony and brilliantly self-conscious works of nonfiction. His published three novels: The Broom of the System (1987), Infinite Jest (1996, which is considered by some as one of the great works of the 20^th century), and The Pale King (2011); three story collections:Girl with Curious Hair (1989), Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999) and Oblivion (2004); and several collections of essays including A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster (2005). D.T. Max’s superb biography of Wallace is titled Every Love Story is a Ghost Story.

1. The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis (1942). An amusing reversal of The Divine Comedy, this novel consists of letters from a senior devil (Screwtape) to his young nephew Wormword, teaching him how to tempt his first human “patient” to perdition. Lewis nicely balances theology and psychology, depicting hell as a bureaucracy with murderous office politics, and the loss of one’s soul as an imperceptible poisoning through chains of seemingly inconsequential sins.

2. The Stand by Stephen King (1978). This vivid apocalyptic tale with dozens of finely drawn characters begins with the military’s mistaken release of a deadly superflu that wipes out almost everyone on earth. The few survivors, spread out across the barren United States, are visited in their dreams by a kindly old woman in Nebraska and a sinister man in the West. They begin making their way toward these separate camps for what will prove to be a last stand between the forces of good and evil.

3. Red Dragon by Thomas Harris (1981). Imitation is the most annoying form of flattery for archfiend Dr. Hannibal Lecter in this terrifying predecessor to The Silence of the Lambs. Red Dragon describes the original capture of cannibalistic serial killer Lecter and his subsequent indignation on hearing that another monster is imitating his sadistic methods. Harris skillfully leaves open who is manipulating whom when Lecter agrees to help the FBI track down the copycat, who matches Lecter eye for eye —literally.

4. The Thin Red Line by James Jones (1962). Green recruits become hardened soldiers, their eyes reflecting the “thousand yard stare” of those who have seen too much, in this novel set during World War II’s battle for Guadalcanal. Narrated from the perspective of various soldiers assigned to Charlie Company, the novel reflects the complexity of war —the horror and heroism of its licensed murder —while navigating the “thin red line between the sane and the mad.”

5. Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973). This iconic feminist novel of fantasy, liberation, and “the zipless fuck” kicked up plenty of dust in the early 1970s. The unpublished writer and unhappily married Isadora Wing yearns to fly free and receives her epiphany through an affair and the discovery of her own sexuality and power. Many critics dismissed Jong as a pornographer in literary clothing; her protagonist, they claimed, was as self-absorbed as the baby boomers themselves. But the book sold millions and became a touchstone for a much greater social movement.

6. The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris (1988). Dr. Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter is a deranged serial killer and a brilliant psychiatrist —who better to help the FBI profile psychos like Buffalo Bill, who loves peeling the skin off his lovely young victims? So the Bureau dispatches Clarice Starling, a smart, charming, slightly vulnerable agent, to Lecter’s prison cell. While playing mind games with Clarice, Lecter provides her with strange but telling clues, which she pursues against her superiors’ wishes and the clock ticking out the seconds for Buffalo Bill’s next victim.

7. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein (1961). A counterculture favorite during the 1960s, this novel tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, who was born during the first flight to Mars. Reared by Martians, the orphan returns to Earth as a young man, where he questions the customs and values taken for granted there. Michael also learns he inherited a large fortune and the deed to Mars. As the world government tries to seize his assets, Michael forms a church preaching free love. His followers think he is the Messiah —and that spells trouble.

8. Fuzz by Ed McBain (1968). Fueled by clever plots, sharp dialogue, and vivid characters, McBain’s series of novels set in New York City’s 87th Precinct is a gold standard of the police procedural. This novel features one of the genre’s great villains, the murderous Deaf Man, who taunts and ridicules his blue-clad adversaries.

9. Alligator by Shelley Katz (1977). He’s the Moby-Dick of the Everglades —a twenty-foot-long alligator with eighty razor sharp teeth who stalks men for pleasure. Like all legendary beasts, this killer is a symbol of mankind’s weakness and a challenge to those who dream of proving their mettle. When two death-hardened adventurers vow to pursue this leviathan, the hunters become the prey in this atmospheric thriller.

10. The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy (1991). The Cold War meets the age of terror in this pulsing techno thriller. Hoping both to derail Israeli–Palestinian peace and darken U.S.–Soviet relations, terrorists smuggle a nuclear weapon into the United States. Only one man can save the day, Clancy’s series hero, Jack Ryan, a CIA agent racked by personal and professional problems. Clancy brandishes his encyclopedic knowledge of the military —including plans for building a hydrogen bomb —while capturing a hero filled with doubt.

THE TOP TEN