Read How to Save Your Own Life Online

Authors: Erica Jong

How to Save Your Own Life (38 page)

But this synopsis is too glib. Many things have changed for the better as a result of feminism. Men are enjoying hands-on fathering. Women expect sexual pleasure and sometimes get it. Marriages of equality are the rule rather than the exception. These changes are such a part of our culture that we no longer even see them as changes.
How to Save Your Own Life
shows what a rocky road it was to get here and how many couples came apart along the way. Transitional times are hard on love and marriage. But what times are not transitional?
After wars, we get a spate of war novels. After a wave of feminism, novels about the war between the sexes are rampant. We look to them in part to clear up our confusion about how to relate to the opposite sex. It seems that all the rules have changed and we want to know what to do. We hope novels will enlighten us.
Betrayal hurts. The loss of innocence always feels new. Love ought to be forever, and when it proves not to be we are shocked as if we were promised something different.
I was always interested in telling the truth about women's lives, writing the books that didn't yet exist; but opening my novels at random, I am always surprised by my own candor. How could I have written
that
? I wonder. Why didn't I hide behind a more opaque mask? I guess the answer is that I always admired novels that read like sheer unvarnished truth. I believed that all writing was a species of autobiography and I felt that honesty mattered more than disguise.
The novelists I loved and argued with in my imagination when I was young—Philip Roth and John Updike—both were after intimate revelations of sexual politics from the male point of view. I thought they often misunderstood the female, and I was inspired to supply it. How can you tell the story of love without the woman's point of view? You can't. The woman's point of view is not only essential; it is also raw after so many centuries of being suppressed. There is no way to sanitize it, civilize it, without losing its essential flavor.
So perhaps my embarrassment is really about being naked on the page. The very thing I sought is the thing that discomfits me. Talk about answered prayers.
But Isadora's self-destructiveness also pains me. I see aspects of my younger self in her, and my younger self was struggling to rise above her own self-loathing and self-injury. She is always running to the brink of a precipice, then jumping. I want to counsel her to stop, but she is trapped in a book and cannot hear me. She is always punishing herself by falling in love with the wrong guys, making deals with the wrong producers—almost as if she knew she would wind up in a quandary. But without quandaries, there would be no story. Isadora's failings trigger the plot. If she were wise and moderate, she would not get into so many scrapes. And without scrapes, how would she grow and change?
I read about my younger self like a worried mother watching a daughter she loves. No wonder I find it so hard. I have to shut up and let her find her own way. But all the while, I want to rewrite her to spare her pain.
Impossible! This would be like having a sixty-year-old brain in a thirty-year-old body. We think such wisdom would enhance our lives, but actually it would stop them cold. Imagine knowing in advance all the pitfalls of life and avoiding them. There would be no life. Isadora's a fool for love, but at least she's alive. I must try to forgive her. And myself.
And what about Josh and Isadora? Their marriage was the triumph of hope and their divorce the beginning of cynicism. They loved, had a child, then parted acrimoniously, then eventually became friends. Could anything have saved them? In different times, would they have stayed together? All this is unknowable. But in this novel their love lasts forever.
 
—ERICA JONG
January 2006
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TARCHER/PENGUIN
Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life
“Readers expecting gutsy writing from the author of
Fear of Flying
will not be disappointed [by this] vesty, freewheeling memoir of the writing life,” said
Kirkus
in a starred review. And the
New York Post
called
Seducing the Demon
“brutally funny, searingly sensual, and fiercely honest.”
 
ISBN 1-58542-444-7
$22.95 ($32.00 CAN)
1
The “F” Questionnaire, invented by Gretchen Kendall (patent pending), is described as “a simple quiz for feminists to determine which men are safe to fuck.” It contains such questions as: “When referring to members of the opposite sex, do you use the term (a) chick, (b) girl, (c) woman, (d) bird, (e) Ms., (f) your highness, (g) cunt, (h) the distaff side, (i) the little woman...” and: “In any relationship, who should be responsible for contraception? (a) the man 50 percent of the time, (b) the woman 100 percent of the time, (c) the man 100 percent of the time, (d) all of the above....” There are numerous trick questions and an elaborate scoring system to “smoke out” (as Ms. Kendall describes it) “the numerous phony male feminists in our midst.” Almost no one passes, and I have often thought that Gretchen would be better off instituting a sort of “Open Admissions” policy—much like the City University of New York.

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