How to Save Your Own Life

Table of Contents

 

 

Also
by
Erica
Jong

POETRY

Fruits and
Vegetables

Half-Lives

Loveroot

At
the Edge of the Body

Ordinary Miracles

Becoming Light

 

FICTION

Fear of
Flying

Fanny: Being the True History
of
the Adventures
of Fanny
Hackabout-jones

Megan's
Book
of Divorce: Megan's Two
Houses

Parachutes
Kisses

Serenissima:
A Novel of Venice (republished as Shylock's Daughter)

Any
Woman's
Blues

 

NONFICTION

Seducing
the Demon

The Devil at Large:
Erica Jong
on Henry Miller

Fear of Fifty

Inventing Memory

What
Do Women
Want?

JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin
Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada,
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London
WC2R ORL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland
(a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road,
Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) •
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017,
India Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310,
New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa)
(Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa • Penguin Books Ltd,
Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

 

First Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin printing 2006

Copyright © 1977, 2006 by Erica Mann Jong

Afterword copyright © 2006 by Erica Mann Jong
All rights reserved. No part of this hook may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed
or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of
copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
Published simultaneously in Canada

Most Tarcher/Penguin books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchase for sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising, and educational needs. Special books or book excerpts also can be created to fit specific needs. For details, write Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Special Markets, 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

 

eISBN : 978-1-101-07694-1

 

 

 

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Portions of this book first appeared in
Playboy,New Dawn, Family Circle, Vogue,
and
Mademoiselle
magazines.

Grateful acknowledgment is made for use of portions of the following:

“Because” (John Lennon, Paul McCartney) © 1969 Northern Songs, Ltd. All rights for the United States, Canada, Mexico and the Philippines controlled by Maclen Music, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

 

“A Day in the Life” (John Lennon, Paul McCartney) © 1967 Northern Songs, Ltd. All rights for the United States, Canada, Mexico and the Philippines controlled by Maclen Music, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Love and thanks to Elaine Geiger and Sterling Lord for support and encouragement beyond the call of duty, Grace and David Griffin, Alice Bach, Jonathan Fast, who read and reread through all the drafts, Marjorie Larkin, who typed and commented, Jennifer Josephy, who edited and commented, Louis Untermeyer, who liked the happy poems better than the sad ones, and all the people who wrote even when I could not answer.

E.J.

What is the end of fame? ‘tis but to fill
A certain portion of uncertain paper:
Some liken it to climbing up a hill,
Whose summit, like
all
hills, is lost in vapour;
For
this men write, speak, preach, and heroes kill,
And bards burn
what
they call their “midnight taper, ”
To have, when the original is dust,
A name, a wretched picture, and worst bust.

—LORD BYRON,
Don Juan

 

 

Experience, though noon auctoritee
Were in this world, is right ynough to me
To speke of
wo
that is in
marriage....

—CHAUCER,
The
Wife of
Bath's
Prologue

 

 

To
cheat oneself out of love
is the most terrible deception;
it is an eternal loss for which
there is no reparation, either
in time or in eternity.

-SÖREN KIERKEGAARD

 

 

Using
another as a means of satisfaction
and security is not love. Love is never
security; love is a state in which there
is no desire to be secure; it is a state
of vulnerability....

-J. KRISHNAMURTI

I left my husband on Thanksgiving Day ...

I left my husband on Thanksgiving Day. It was nine years since I met him and almost that long since I'd married him-time enough to know something isn't working, and yet it wasn't easy.

Thanksgiving was an odd day to choose-or was it? On and off since I was two I have lived on the same block in Manhattan: that row of apartment buildings opposite the Museum of Natural History and the only street in New York privileged to be the launching pad for the giant balloons of Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. As a little girl, I was allowed to stay up all night on Thanksgiving Eve to watch the trucks carrying the helium cylinders arrive and the great wrinkled latex balloons begin to take shape under their sandbagged cages of netting.

Starting at nine or so the night before the parade, the trucks would begin pulling in, and gradually the enormous outlines of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Superman, the panda, and the dinosaur would be spread out on the black asphalt of the street. Later, Bullwinkle and the Smile balloon were added to the menagerie, but I was already older and the whole event was not as magical as it once had been. I had a special fondness for Bullwinkle though. He and I had something in common: a sort of quintessential silliness and an incurable naïveté.

I was not the only one on Seventy-seventh Street who was allowed to stay up all night that one special night a year. The other kids on the block were similarly blessed. We felt we owned the parade, and we would go downstairs and chummily feed sugar cubes to the policemen's horses (I was always terrified of losing a finger), thinking ourselves the luckiest kids in New York City-special, singled out, rare.

If we managed to keep ourselves awake that long, we could see the balloons swelling up toward our apartment windows by five or six in the morning. The process took all night, and sometimes, hard as I fought against it, I was asleep by two. I'd set an alarm for six, sleep in my clothes, and run downstairs to admire my balloons before the rest of the world possessed them. At the age of ten or so, I used to dream of mutinies in which I was the ringleader who convinced a gang of kids to steal a balloon. We kidnapped it to the center of Central Park, and held it captive while all the adults threw their hands up in despair.

But there I was leaving my husband on Thanksgiving morning. Leaving the seven-room co-op passed on to me by my grandfather, leaving my books, my typewriter, most of my clothes. Hurrying out at 7:30 A.M. past a giant Bullwinkle who seemed much more wrinkled than I remembered. I had three suitcases: beige linen imprinted with violets. One contained all the notes for the book I was writing; another was a dress bag with clothes varied enough for chilly New York, cold Chicago, warm Los Angeles, and the unpredictable weather in between; and the third was a cosmetics bag containing two hair driers, twelve bottles of vitamins, two bottles of perfume, various makeups, creams, and shampoos, assorted books, notebooks, and most of my good jewelry. I was on the lam, an exile from a bad marriage, a wandering Jewess, a lifelong New Yorker heading west. Released from a dying union by the news of an old adultery, reborn through a friend's suicide, I was off to meet a lover and my destiny-with my excuse for going to a movie I supposedly had to work on in Los Angeles.

But I was leaving for good. Even if my husband didn't know it, I did. And I was scared. Exuberant one minute, terrified the next. Two things sustained me: a new love, and a vision of my friend Jeannie dying in her mother's old fur coat in the back seat of a car idling in her locked garage on Cape Cod. Live or die. There are only two ways to go. Jeannie took one fork in the road and left the other to me. The legacy of her suicide was live. And suddenly, at thirty-two, I was released from my irrational fears, and at last took flight.

I had wanted to leave my marriage for years ...

Why
is it harder to leave a loveless marriage than a loving one? Because a loveless marriage
is
born of desperation, while a
loving
one is born of choice....

I had wanted to leave my marriage for years, had saved it up like a sweet before bedtime, like a piece of bubble gum put on the childhood bedpost, like the evening out you promise yourself after a day of writing. It was never any good-not from the beginning. But I deformed my mind to believing it was. I told myself nothing better was possible. I convinced myself that sadness and compromise were the ways of the world....