To celebrate her birthday, three classics by Erica Jong

Erica Jong is 76 years old this week.

Her first novel, Fear of Flying (1973) became a feminist anthem and sold twenty million copies; twenty-five more books have followed.

Across her fiction, nonfiction and poetry, Jong has conducted a half-century autopsy-in-progress on her own life. Her first three marriages were the subjects of books (when you marry your college sweetheart, a Chinese-American psychologist, and a novelist son of a novelist, how could one not? BTW, her fourth, since 1989, is a lawyer).

Jong’s Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life (2006), is another installment of memoir-to-date.

Kirkus Reviews called the book “a zesty, savvy, freewheeling memoir of the writing life, portions of which first appeared in the New York Times Book Review and The Writer magazine.

“Readers expecting gutsy writing from the author of Fear of Flying (1973) will not be disappointed. Jong vows to tell the truth about herself: her mistakes, her regrets, her divorces, her lawsuits. As she explains it, even the most uncomfortable things she did, she did knowing that she would write about them. She is candid about her addiction to alcohol and her rehab efforts, the time she passed out next to Robert Redford at a dinner party, her night in a Beverly Hills jail for drunk driving and, of course, her sexual encounters. ‘I kill my enemies with words,’ she writes, and her rebuttal of Martha Stewart’s claim that Jong ruined her marriage is a demonstration of that skill.

Henry Bemis Books has a first edition, first printing, inscribed to the recipient, “I know prisons now, see page 244-”

Henry’s autographed first edition is available at $75 or best offer.

Henry Bemis Books also has one of her mid-career titles in a very nice first edition:

Jong, Erica, Any Woman’s Blues (Harper & Row, stated 1st ed., 1st printing, 1990). ISBN 0-06-016272-4. A festival of emotional codependency and addictive behavior as only the author of Fear of Flying can tell it. Hardcover, unclipped dust jacket showing a bit of wear at the edges, very good condition.

Henry’s price: $35 or best offer.

Erica Jong, Fear of Flying (Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1973, 1st ed). Possible pirated ed from presence of Chinese script opposite title page.

Hardcover, 340 pp. Unclipped dust jacket, wear to edges of jacket. Octavo. Good condition. HBB price: $20.