Erica Jong is a poet, novelist, and essayist best known for her eight best-selling novels: Fear of Flying, which has sold 20 million copies in more than 40 languages, How to Save Your Own Life, Fanny: Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones, Parachutes & Kisses, Shylock's Daughter (or Serenissima), Any Woman's Blues, Inventing Memory, and Sappho's Leap. Her mid-life memoir Fear of Fifty also became a major international best-seller. Her latest book is the anthology Sugar in My Bowl: Real Women Write About Real Sex (Ecco), which she edited. Known for her commitment to women's rights, authors' rights, and free expression, Jong is a frequent keynote speaker and lecturer in the U.S. and abroad. She has spoken at International Women's Day at the Royal Library in Copenhagen, the International Jewish Literature Festival in Rome, the Goteborg Book Festival, La Milanesiana in Milan, Italy, the Iowa Women's Leadership Conference, San Miguel Writer's Conference in Mexico, The Aspen Writers' Foundation's Summer and Winter Words, Skirball, and has given Master Classes at Barnard and Hunter Colleges in New York City.
In addition to speaking about women's rights and the status and future of women today, Jong has remarkable insights about sexuality in America. Her life and career has afforded her this keen perspective and she uses the multi-generational and multi-cultural backgrounds gleaned from editing Sugar in My Bowl as a jumping off point for this discussion. In this eye-opening and courageous collection by women about sex, Jong reveals that every woman has her own answer to the question of what women want out of sex. Susan Cheever talks about the "excruciating hazards of casual sex," while Gail Collins recounts her Catholic upbringing in Cincinnati and the nuns who passionately forbade her from having "carnal relations." In "Everything Must Go," Jennifer Weiner explores how, in love, the body can play just as big a role as the heart. The octogenarians in Karen Abbott's sharp-eyed piece possess a passion that could give Betty White a run for her money. Molly Jong-Fast reflects on her unconventional upbringing and why a whole generation of young women have rejected "free love" in favor of Bugaboo strollers and Mommy-and-me yoga. Sex, it turns out, can be as fleeting, heavy, mundane, and intense as the rest of life. Indeed, Jong states in her powerful introduction "the truth is - sex is life."
Jong is also the author of seven award-winning collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Love Comes First. She is also the author of five non-fiction (memoir and reporting) books and regularly blogs for The Huffington Post. Her work has appeared all over the world in magazines, newspapers, and blogs.
Jong served as president of The Authors' Guild from 1991 to 1993 and still serves on the Board. She established a program for young writers at her alma mater, Barnard College. The Erica Mann Jong Writing Center at Barnard teaches students the art of peer tutoring and editing. Columbia University (where she received her M.A. in 18th century literature) acquired her literary archive in 2008.
In 1998, Erica was honored with the United Nations Award for Excellence in Literature. She has received Poetry magazine's Bess Hokin Prize for her poetry and the Deauville Award for Literary Excellence in France. In Italy, she received the Sigmund Freud Award for Literature in 1975. In June 2009, Jong won the first Fernanda Pivano Prize for Literature in Italy.
Jong is currently working on a novel featuring "a woman of a certain age." Its working title is secret. Fear of Flying is in preparation as a BBC mini-series. She lives in New York City.
Praise for Sugar in My Bowl:
"[A] fierce, fearless collection."
-- More Magazine
"The women of this collection make the case that good sex is never exclusively about the act, but also about how you approach it."
-- NPR
"Abundant with affairs, marriages, motherhood and our sexual sense of mortality it is a thoughtful read, a perfect aperitif on a summer evening. The stories penetrate a secret space in our brains we so often neglect: our sense of sexuality."
-- Forbes
"Jong has crafted candid accounts of love and passion from renowned female writers into a sensual and sensitive read."
-- Interview
"[Sugar in My Bowl] runs the gamut from pornographic and hilarious to ironic and poignant. The result is a fun, quick, beach read, requiring as much or as little intellectual energy as the reader chooses to invest."
-- Chicago Sun-Times
"You can take these women seriously, laugh, squirm, and put hand over mouth at their weird, exciting, uncomfortable, joyous tales of ardor, while still admiring the agility of their prose."
-- The Daily
"Reading Sugar in My Bowl offers a rare opportunity to peer in on a breadth of intimate sexual experiences, a wide variety of motivations, and problems and desires you never knew existed-as well as the little thrill of stumbling upon a story that sounds like your own."
-- Slate Double XX