Erica Jong Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Rolande Diot

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.

In How To Save Your Own Life, a character called Kurt Hammer is thus described by the female narrator and heroine Isadora Wing—Jong's alter ego and fantasmatic persona—in the book:

Kurt Hammer has honed his underground reputation on tattered copies of his reputed-to-be pornographic novels, smuggled in through customs in the days where sex was considered unfit for...
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