Synopses & Reviews
Erica Jong began this book as a guide for aspiring writers. It was to be a book full of practical advice, inspiring examples, and sage wisdom ("Dare to dream," for instance). But she quickly realized that writing such a book would be dishonest, a way to veil the difficult nature of the writer's life with platitudes and encouragement. A demon out of an Isaac Singer story whispered in Jong's ear: "Tell the truth!" She knew she had no choice but to obey.
Seducing the Demon is the sublime and salacious story of one writer's long and successful career as a poet, novelist, and feminist provocateur. Throughout, Jong is refreshingly direct-whether writing sex scenes, evoking the lure of alcohol and grass in the search for ecstasy, or conforming to the rigid narrative of AA. She tells us candidly about how she always lusted after Bill Clinton, and how she discovered the joys of tantric sex. Equally candid about the privileges of fame and the slaps of notoriety, Jong is above all loyal to the importance of telling the truth in an age of lies.
Jong tells us she writes "to get my life down on paper so it can never be extinguished," and "to keep from going mad." She speaks of the power of sexual desire to "transmute words into flesh," and reveals how a range of writers, from Kafka and Nabokov to Henry Miller and Pablo Neruda, influenced and guided her. Delivering trenchant observations on great writers, she compares the ethereal Virginia Woolf to the earthy James Joyce: "She is Ariel to James Joyce's Caliban." An uncanny combination of bookish and bawdy, literary and libidinous, Seducing the Demon is an invaluable glimpse into one of the most provocative minds of our time.
Review
"Political, irreverent, risqué and wonderfully unrepentant....Women should be talking about this book. Men should be reading this book. We should all try to live up to her standard of self-awareness." Los Angeles Times
Review
"At times, Jong seems simply to be having a conversation with herself. Then she sucker-punches the reader with a commanding sentence, like her definition of a writer as 'someone who takes the universal whore of language and turns her into a virgin again.'" Portland Oregonian
Review
"[A]fter seducing her readers into attentive submission, she delivers stinging commentary on our society's detrimental disinterest in literature, appetite for didacticism, sexual hypocrisy, and distrust of pleasure." Booklist
Review
"Jong says she started out writing a book of advice to writers....But what she ends up doing is giving us the same feeling we get when we see a car wreck you don't want to see the carnage, but you can't seem to look away." Chicago Sun-Times
Review
"[Jong] talks about what writing has meant in her own life [and] what she has tried to do throughout her long career: speak her own truth, no matter the consequences." Washington Post
Review
"Seducing the Demon is another of Jong's efforts to consecrate the great passions of her life: poetry in its timeless holiness; the exalted rigors of the writer's life; love and sex in all their maddening worth." New York Times
Review
"If leaving the reader wanting more is the mark of success, then Jong succeeds." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"This book like [Jong's] last dozen is amazing only for its mediocrity. It is amazing only for its meanspiritedness, its tedium, its awkward prose, and its stunning self-absorption. Literature can bear a great deal of self-absorption, but Jong may well have overshot the mark. Literary aspiration, at the end of the day, is a limited plot device. Especially in the absence of literary talent." Cristina Nehring, The Atlantic Monthly (read the entire Atlantic Monthly review)
Synopsis
Seducing the Demon is the sublime and salacious story of one writer's long and successful career as a poet, novelist, and feminist provocateur. Throughout, Jong is refreshingly direct-whether writing sex scenes, evoking the lure of alcohol and grass in the search for ecstasy, or conforming to the rigid narrative of AA.
Synopsis
Erica Jong's memoir-a national bestseller-was probably the most wildly reviewed book of 2006. Critics called it everything from "brutally funny," "risqu? and wonderfully unrepentant," and "rowdy, self-deprecating, and endearing" to "a car wreck."* Throughout her book tour, Jong was unflappably funny, and responded to her critics with a hilarious essay on NPR's
All Things Considered, which is included in this paperback edition. In addition to prominent review and feature coverage, Jong was a guest on
Today and
Real Time with Bill Maher. Even Rush Limbaugh flirted with Jong on his radio program: "I think she wants me. I think she's fantasizing about me." Love her, hate her, Jong still knows how to seduce the country and, most important, keep the pages turning.
About the Author
Erica Jong is the author of nineteen books of poetry, fiction, and memoir, including Fear of Flying, which has more than 18 million copies in print worldwide. Her most recent essays have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, and she is a frequent guest on television talk shows. Currently working on a novel featuring Isadora Wing the heroine of Fear of Flying as a woman of a certain age, Erica and her lawyer husband live in New York City and Connecticut. Her daughter, Molly Jong-Fast, is also an author.