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Erica Jong's new book has echoes of her most famous novel, 1973's 

 — which invited women to be as avid for sex and as delighted with it as men are.
The new book is called 

 (small spoiler alert: Everyone does not end up dead at the end), and Jong tells NPR's Linda Wertheimer that the book was originally called 

, and it was about a happily married woman whose husband is much older, and not well — so the subtitle was 

. "When I turned it in to my publisher, they said, 'That is the title of the book.' It was not my working title. However, it does make a nice trilogy: 

Fear of Flying, Fear of Fifty, Fear of Dying.

On heroine Vanessa Wonderman, a glamorous 60-ish actress, and her billionaire husband

He's 20 years older, or more. And Vanessa, who's always been a beauty, who men have loved, suddenly finds herself living in a life without sex. She wants to embrace life — her parents are dying, her husband may be dying, she wants to embrace life. So she goes to a website called Zipless, and she looks up people she can meet for sex. And the fantasy is she will find sex without strings attached. In fact, she finds a selection of lunatics.

Actually, I thought it was essential to do it, because sex follows us throughout our lives. The need for touch, the need for connection, that never goes away. But the forms of it change. As people age, touch is more important, erections are less important. And I think somebody needs to write about that.

We were the generation that was never going to get old, right? We were entitled to sex, success, you know, everything. And our parents adored us and made us feel that we were entitled to everything. And now, seeing their decrepitude, and our own creeping changes — if not yet decrepitude — makes us think, God, we were promised something better than this! And it makes for a lot of humor, I think.



I was so worried about it. And I thought of so many different endings. As indeed with 

, the end was the hardest to write. And yet I always knew that 

 would end in India, because India is a place of transformation, a place where Vanessa comes to peace with the cycles of life.
When my husband read the book, he said, "It's a love story with a happy ending." So it is dark and it is light, it is satirical and it is sad — like all my books, I think. Like all my poems.  Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Arts and Culture

The Thread® - Books and Literary News

Author Erica Jong famously explored female sexuality in 1973's 'Fear of Flying.' In her new novel, she writes about how the need for sex, touch and connection doesn't diminish when you get older.

'Fear of Dying' asks: Can you go zipless at 60?

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