Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old work.
Two novels by Erica Jong—Fear of Flying and How to Save Your Own Life—end with a kind of symbolic ritual baptism in celebration of the female body. In the first novel, Fear of Flying, the heroine, Isadora Wing, returns to her patient but dull husband after an unsuccessful attempt to find in Adrian Goodlove the perfect combination of friend and lover. Stripping off her clothes, she climbs into the claw-footed bathtub, immerses herself in water up to her neck and contemplates her body. "A nice body," she tells us. "Mine. I decided to keep it." It's a comforting picture which leaves the reader with a sense of well-being. At the end of the second novel, How to Save Your Own Life, Isadora, now husbandless but firmly clasped in the arms of her young lover, Josh, finally experiences orgasm with him. Paradoxically, she has up to this point been automatically responsive to her husband's mechanical embrace, but unable to achieve orgasm with Josh's more spontaneous and inspired lovemaking. In Joycean fashion, Isadora commemorates the momentous occasion by passing water.
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