Erica Jong Delights Garden Party With Sex Anthology

Weston poet and writer Erica Jong launched a tour on Friday for her latest book, Sugar in My Bowl, at a lavish garden party benefiting the Westport Public Library’s summer reading program.

The poolside event was hosted by travel writer and food blogger Elise Meyer.

Known best for Fear of Flying, the 1973 novel that defined a guiltless sexual encounter for a generation and has sold 20 million copies worldwide (so says Wikipedia), Jong subtitles Sugar, an anthology, Real Women Write about Real Sex.”

She drew upon a diverse company of 28 women writers to compile the collection of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, playwriting and cartoonery to present a panorama of impressions of sexual experiences, from childhood to seniorhood.

A graduate of Barnard College whose literary career has spanned five decades, Jong is no stranger to sexual double entendres.

The title is taken from a song popularized by Bessie Smith in 1931. It’s a bluesy ode to sexual desire, a singer’s lament for a lusty union after her man has left. It goes in part:

     I need a little sugar in my bowl,

     I need a little hot dog, on my roll

     I can stand a bit of lovin’, oh so bad,

     I feel so funny, I feel so sad

Even the book’s jacket cover suggests a double entendre. Pictured is an oval-shaped bowl, lined in white and red, filled to overflowing with brightly-colored gum drops. (Meyer carried the theme through to her patio banquet table, covering it over with colorful gumballs interspersed among slices of her homemade chocolate “Better Than Sex” cake.)

The literary selections range from the evocative to the provocative.

Jong’s own contribution, a short story called “Kiss,” overflows with hyperbolic prose.

As she writes:

It was a kiss that went back to the birth of the universe, the making of the stars, the sculpting of humans out of clay. It was a mitochondrial kiss in which generations were born, died and were buried, in which trees leaped out, bloomed, fell and rotted, and gave birth to new forests. It was a kiss that moistened oceans, grew the universe, swirled through the cosmos.

As she read the short story aloud to an overflowing audience of women of all ages, they swooned in unison with appreciation of the power of the (spoken) written word.

Jong’s aim in the book was to present psychological images, not pornographic ones, she said.

It turns out her raunchiest contributors were the oldest, including columnist and newswoman Liz Smith, who writes of her deflowering by a first cousin on an old quilt laid out under the Texas stars.

Most selections exalt sex and romance, but Jong’s own daughter, the precocious Molly Jong-Fast, will have nothing of that.

Jong-Fast titles her piece “They Had Sex So I Didn’t Have To.”

An author and mother of three young children, Jong-Fast writes that her mother “fought for free love” and both sets of her grandparents had open marriages.

“I have a closed marriage (that’s where you only sleep with the person you are married to),” she writes in a worldly-wise tone. “If it is every generation’s job to swing the pendulum back, then I have done mine.”