Seducing the Demon

It's no secret I like Erica Jong.  Part of the strength of my affection is that she also gives me permission to hate her, as sometimes I do with equal ferocity.  She is brash, selfish, insecure, flippant, tireless.  She takes life by the balls.  Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life was dubbed a "car-wreck" by the Chicago Sun-Times and I think they are confusing the author with the work, a common mistake among critics and everyday readers as well.  The book is superbly well-written.  Sure, it's self-indulgent, sure it gets a little side-tracked, but it fulfills its stated purpose: to expose the writing side of Jong's life (as opposed to her many, many other demons which make cameos along the way).

It is Jong, not her writing, that is the car-wreck.  It's impossible to look away from a life this colourful, dramatic, out-of-control.  You are mesmerised by the broken bodies, dribbling gasoline, the unnecessary trauma.  But, as Jong makes clear, to what an outsider seems like a useless lineage of heartache and foolishness has actually been a necessary learning curve, a coping mechanism, a survival-by-obstacle-course approach to keeping the devil at bay.  "My tendency to dramatise murders ordinary life and ordinary people.  I care more about drama than ordinary people and ordinary life...Don't be a novelist unless you can tolerate this...Novelists love to weep."

This memoir is everything we have come to expect from Jong: brazen, contradictory feminism, blow jobs to wrinkly old publishers in hopes of a first edition of Keats, DUIs, bad choices, big cocks, sweaty backstage kisses, searing honesty.

She talks intimately of her ambivalence towards motherhood, how she wrongly believed real writers weren't mothers, until she had her daughter Molly and realised that a writer learns more about fantasy and reality from children than from books.  Writing is an author's meditation, a chance to make sense of the chaos swirling around us (and within us).  It would seem, in respect to Jong and many other writers, that a dramatic, challenging, exhausting life is necessary in order to come in from the cold, sit down at the table, and record the brutal truth of things (the worst of those brutal truths being that we must deal with the consequences of our actions and reactions).

"Writing is not a hostile act but an act of understanding - even when it's satirical, even when it's bitter.  You only write about the things you care about.  Indifference doesn't need to be put into words."

And I guess that's why I keep coming back to her, even when she infuriates me: she CARES.  About everylittlething.  Writing isn't a vocation like bar tending or bookkeeping.  It's a life.  A full one.