In “Love Comes First,” Erica Jong’s first poetry collection in nearly a decade, there’s a lovely piece, “The Poetry Cat,” about luring the elusive poem onto the page.
Novels are something else altogether.
“A poem comes when a poem comes, and you have to be ready and there for it,” the author of “Fear of Flying” tells The Post’s Barbara Hoffman. “A novel you have to force yourself to write every day. You have to be there, at your desk. You’re not waiting for the novel to show up, but working, even if you’re writing garbage.”
Reading garbage is another thing.
“I feel I should know what’s happening in pop culture, but I lose interest,” she confesses. “A long time ago, someone sent me a galley proof of [Judith Krantz’s] ‘Scruples,’ and I remember reading it aloud to my then-husband and laughing because I thought it was so ghastly.
“But it turned out to be a huge bestseller, so what do I know?”
Here are some of the books she’s read and treasures.
Somewhere Towards the End: A Memoir
by Diana Athill
It’s a book I reviewed two months ago – a memoir by a 90-year-old woman and distinguished editor of V.S. Naipaul, Anthony Burgess and many other wonderful writers. She never married, never had a child, but she’s a very graceful and humorous writer. How does an atheist in her 90s confront death, accepting joyfully her life and its eventual end? It’s such a delicious book.
Bleak House
by Charles Dickens
I could have said “David Copperfield,” his most autobiographical novel, but I chose “Bleak House” because it shows you how useless it is to go to the law for self-fulfillment .ñ.ñ. It’s a gigantic novel linked together by a lawsuit that goes on and on and on for generations. It shows you how desperately wrong our values are, not in an abstract way, but in the lives of people.
Epilogue: A Memoir
by Anne Roiphe
There are a lot of memoirs about loss, because women are living longer than they used to. This is a beautifully written book about loneliness, and how you go on. What’s interesting about Anne Roiphe’s books – she’s a wonderful writer – is that she writes very realistically about what it means to be a woman today.
The Landmark Herodotus
edited by Robert B. Strassler
Herodotus is, in a way, the first historian – an ancient Greek who’s given us the most detailed description of ancient Egypt we have. “The Landmark” came out last year and has a lot of auxiliary stuff in it, and an index so you can read what you need – from the embalming of bodies to the Oracle of Delphi. Just read the stuff about ancient Egypt and you’ll be fascinated. I think that’s where Norman Mailer got all his research for “Ancient Evenings.”