Read Online How to Save Your Own Life by Erica Jong - Free Book Online

it was too late, what I understood made it absolutely clear to me that I could never go back.
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    Gretchen is five foot eight, blonde, has enormous boobs, a raunchy tongue, and professes Marxism, feminism, and a passion for baroque music. Two years ago, during the gay-chic phase of the Women’s Movement, she and I talked a lot about having an affair—but, of course, we never did. We never really wanted to. It was only the idea that seemed appealing. Instead, we went to London together, when my novel was published there, and we had what can only be called a ten-day-long primal therapy session in our hotel room at the Dorchester. It was a pretty hellish experience, which convinced us both that we should never again attempt to live or travel together, but it left us fast friends. Secretly, I am a little intimidated by Gretchen. Her domineering nature (Leo, Leo ascendant), her professed radicalism, her fast mouth, her extraordinary beauty. She has so much life-force that she makes everyone else in the room feel drained. She overwhelms me.
    Once, when I was being interviewed by a London women’s magazine, Gretchen sat in the back of the room saying “bullshit” after nearly every one of my responses. “It’s my goddamned interview!” I finally said in a rage—and of course the snotty journalist made that the headline of the piece. Our friendship nearly faltered over that, but it survived because, in some strange way, Gretchen and I are sisters, and need each other—even to yell at. I love her (and I think she loves me). The fact is—you can’t really write about somebody you don’t love. Even if the portrait is vitriolic, even if the pen is sharpened with old grudges, there has to have been love somewhere along the line, or the sheer, brute energy of pushing that pen across the page will not be there. And writing takes energy—more energy than you ever think you have. And energy comes from love. It takes a spasm of love to write a poem, and several spasms to write a short story, and hundreds of them to write a novel. A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage. From time to time, you get tired of your subject and your passion wanes—but you hang in there for the long haul. Occasionally, you succumb to temptations: a poem or two, an occasional short story; but the novel binds you with its long apron strings. You may stray—but never for good.
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    Gretchen runs her one-woman practice out of a tiny window-less office on Madison Avenue in the sixties. It’s in the back room of another, more successful lawyer’s suite. The walls are covered with political posters, the desk is heaped with briefs and feminist books, pictures of her kids are pasted up on the wall, and there’s a large male nude hanging over her cluttered desk. It’s a hard-edged painting of a naked black man holding a giant watermelon in front of (what we presume is) his penis, and grinning devilishly. To ward off any suspicion of racism, Gretchen tells you at once that the artist is a black woman client of hers. Her clients seldom can afford to pay, so they give Gretchen paintings, Christmas fruitcakes, original manuscripts, or, more often, nothing at all. She barely has enough to cover her rent and answering service—and money is always a sore point with her.
    When I walk into her office, she’s got her feet up on the desk, one welfare mother on hold, and an abortion reformer on the line.
    â€œYou look terrible. Sit down,” she says, and goes on talking. Sometimes I suspect that the phone conversations I overhear in Gretchen’s office are partly performed for my benefit. Gretchen has a great sense of the theatrical. The female Clarence Darrow of feminism.
    â€œOf course he’s a pig. Who did you expect—John Stuart Mill?” A peal of infectious laughter follows. Gretchen has a