…and I love it! Just finished Between Love and Madness, an excerpt from Erica Jong’s new book My Bowl: Real Women Write About Real Sex. It appears in the July issue of Elle, and now I am so looking forward to the book. The excerpt walked that lovely line Jong does so well between romantic angst – could I use that word any more – and eroticism. Fave passages:
“That was also the summer I was introduced to a kind of sex I hadn’t yet let myself in for…Nothing to do with nipple clamps or threesomes or licking honey off a prone or naked body…it had to do with the way he pushed me into new positions, and new submissions as well, not overtly of the S&M kind, but with a subtext that always hovered around the issue of power…intimating at the unspoken questions: How much do you want this? What are you willing to do for it?”
And the hilarious:
“I’d stop trying to endear myself to men who viewed me with a mixture of hostility and curiosity, as though I were an exotic species of female that happened to crawl out from under a rock.”
And the thinking cap scratcher:
“Ownership made sense to me, it always had, suggesting a kind of safety in confinement.”
Since I read Fear of Flying I’ve associated Jong with my favorite erotic romance novelists, the good uns’, you know? who seem to have balls the size of apples: Jaid Black, Lori Foster. Not because Jong necessarily plays to that level of sexual description, but because she writes fiction fearlessly.
I love stories like that.
Sherrod Story - Here lies your book boyfriend...naked. 