3/18/2023 0 Comments Erica jongNo wonder Lewinsky-after a few years of false starts trying to monetize her notoriety (designing handbags, hosting a cheesy dating show, and pocketing millions of dollars to cooperate with a Fleet Street biography, fronting a weight-loss business and sitting down with Barbara Walters)-fled the country and spent a decade in enforced anonymity.Īnd then, early last summer, in a widely read essay about her ordeal for Vanity Fair, titled “Shame and Survival,” Lewinsky popped out of her cocoon and began her media metamorphosis. In a private room at the posh Le Bernardin restaurant, Jong quipped: “My dental hygienist pointed out that she had third-stage gum disease.” Piling on, erotic writer Nancy Friday, a specialist in female sex fantasies, suggested a money-making scheme for Monica: “She can rent out her mouth.” And feminist author Katie Roiphe noted: “he thing I kept hearing over and over again was Monica Lewinsky’s not that pretty.” At the time, Lewinsky was all of 24 and a key figure-“that woman”-in what became only the second impeachment trial of a president of the United States in American history. It was during an infamous January 1998 panel discussion of the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky sex scandal in which prominent New York career women mocked and trashed her. Jong herself was one of the mean girls who arguably bullied Lewinsky from afar. In the 24-hour news cycle, people can be very mean, just to get eyeballs.” “She seems to have made her peace with the press, and I’m always happy when somebody does that. “I’m glad she’s reemerging and seeing herself as a victim of bullying-which she certainly was,” Jong continued. Jong, who is 73, added that she applauds Lewinsky’s recent efforts to step out of the shadows and position herself as a high-profile opponent of cyber-bullying in a splashy New York Times profile, her first print interview in more than a decade, and a widely celebrated TED talk, titled “The Price of Shame,” that prompted a prolonged standing ovation, along with an explosion of positive commentary on the Web.ĭuring that speech in Vancouver, Lewinsky facetiously referred to herself as a horror movie monster, “The Creature from the Media Lagoon.” If Lewinsky’s odyssey from embarrassment to esteem is ultimately successful, the Times piece and the TED talk will likely be seen as pivotal moments in the evolution of her public image. It’s a terrible thing to have to survive-and I have far more empathy now.” People are cruel, and I’m glad she survived it. “If I ever said anything critical about her, I’m sorry,” the Fear of Flying novelist told me on Wednesday, “because women have a tough time when they get famous for anything sexual. Conversations with Erica Jong reveals the writer to be funny, articulate, and passionately committed to her art.Feminist icon Erica Jong admits she’s among the cynics and doubters-including, as it happens, this reporter-who were wrong about Monica Lewinsky. In Jong's writing, humor is a constant, and one of the pleasures of reading these conversations is her abundant wit. She describes the difficulty of escaping categories created by the media and the critical community and the frustration of living in the shadow of one notorious best-seller. She tells the story of the struggle to keep writing honestly when the public's perception of one's work has made one a target. She speaks for all women writers who have addressed sexual topics and who have suffered retaliation. Jong's fame has been deeply branded by the notoriety associated with sex. In several conversations, she talks about the tensions within feminism over the decades. Cast into the role of spokesperson for feminism in the seventies, she has continued to represent her generation of women. With equal attention to the art of fiction and poetry, she yields her views on the literary scene and on the place of poetry in American society.Īmong the highlights of the book is Jong's account of the publication of Fear of Flying and its remarkable, best-seller rise. In interviews from 1973 to 2001, Jong relates the extra-ordinary experience she gained as a pioneer of sexual writing from a female point of view. She was already an established poet when she published Fear of Flying (1973), but the novel's sensational reception came to overshadow all her work. In Conversations with Erica Jong one of the most popular and controversial of contemporary writers has her say.
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