[In the following interview, Jong discusses her memoir Fear of Fifty, her views on feminism, and her goals as a writer.]

[Spampinato]: I read recently that you have two new books that are set to be published soon: Fear of Fifty and Twenty Forty. Would you like to tell me about them?

[Jong]: Twenty Forty is a novel I'm still working on that is set in the future, but it is nowhere near ready for publication. Fear of Fifty, my mid-life memoir, will be published this August [1994], and in it I relate the events of my life, beginning on my fiftieth birthday and moving backward in time. In this process of telling my own story, I tell the story of my generation, which I refer to as "The Whiplash Generation," because we were raised to be Doris Day, grew to young womanhood wanting to be Gloria Steinem, and now we're raising our daughters in the age of Princess Diana and Madonna. So I think we've been buffeted about in our views and opinions of love, of marriage, of motherhood, of feminism, and of course, of femininity itself. I think we are really a remarkable generation. So I tell my own story (very personally and very humorously), as a way of telling the story of my generation.

What made you decide to write Fear of Fifty at this point in your career?

I think there's a sort of natural progression, which is, when you hit mid-life—we optimistically call it mid-life, it may be two-thirds of the way toward death, actually—I think that you begin to see your life in a very different perspective. If your parents are still alive, you begin to see them as human beings, rather than ogres or angels. If you have a child or children, you begin to see where you fit in on the evolutionary chain—between your parents and child. It's a moment of reappraising your life and discovering where you belong in the continuum. This is the time that people want to trace their "roots." "Where did I come from?" and "where did my family come from?" and "how did I get to be me?" become fascinating questions. Given the buffeting that my generation has experienced—with feminism going in and out of style as if it were a hemline—I was drawn to assess why I had been able to function as a creative writer in a world that is not very good to women writers. What gave me my strength, where did it come from? I discovered that it came from both my parents, in different ways. And why was I able to survive creatively when my two sisters were not as free, when my mother was not as free, when my grandmother was not as free. So it was a sort of reappraisal of my life at fifty. And I think that is very typical of the kind of changes that go on psychologically at mid-life.

You mentioned feminism going "in and out of style." Do you perceive any pervasive trends in the current state of contemporary feminist literature and publishing?

I think we went through a period when we had a tremendous split in the feminist movement, between those women who believed that feminism should reach out and embrace homemakers, women with children, women who didn't have the posture of separatists, and those feminists who were very hard line and hard core, and didn't want to open the tent to everyone. And that split I perceived to be one of the problems of the backlash era. (Not that we feminists created the backlash; it came out of the Reagan administration and the Bush administration, and a roll-back of women's rights that came along with a very reactionary trend politically.) But in a sense I think that we also opened ourselves to it, because as feminists we didn't spread our tent wide enough. In the 70s there was a tendency to exclude women who wanted to have children and who loved men. "Where do I fit into this movement?" they asked. Some of them felt they were treated very badly. What I see now is a kind of reaching out, more inclusiveness—which is good. And in the younger generation of feminists, the third-wave feminists, like Naomi Wolf, Katie Roiphe, Susie Bright, and the new people who are coming along and writing books (who are in their late twenties or early thirties) there is a much greater inclusiveness—something I have always been arguing for. Let's not have political litmus tests in order to be included in the feminist movement. You don't have to be one kind of feminist only to be included. And I think it's hopeful that we have more inclusiveness and a kind of "big tent" feminism now, because that gives us the hope of creating a mass movement, rather than an exclusionary movement. I'm very happy about that. The next generation, the third-wave feminists, are coming along, and they're opening the net wider. I think that's good.

How do you respond to critics, particularly feminist critics, who fault your use of sexual vocabulary in your novels? For instance, Gayle Greene, in her book Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition (1991), stated: "Jong confuses liberation with sexual liberation and confuses sexual liberation with the freedom to act and talk like a man." Now she was referring specifically to Fear of Flying, but this has been a fairly consistent criticism of many of your novels. How do you respond to statements like Greene's?

It seems to me natural that in a patriarchal society where women have been deprived of the full use of their sexuality for centuries, or where sexuality has meant a kind of terrible repression and submission for women, that many feminists will feel that the only way to be free is to be anti-sexual. Adrienne Rich has written about this; Audre Lorde has written about this. Women in sexist society frequently throw out Eros, because Eros, for women, has historically been so entrapping. But it is a mistake to throw out Eros, because Eros is the source of our creativity. So I understand that there are feminists who feel that I've sold out to the male principle, but they are deeply misunderstanding the thrust of my work. They themselves have bought into male dichotomies, but they don't even know it! Every creator needs to be fueled by the life-force, and the life-force is Eros. Sexuality is not a matter of bowing down to male subjugation—not at all. Sexuality can be female. I hope that women will recapture their own pagan sensuality, the kind of sensuality that they had thousands of years ago in a pre-patriarchal world, and I hope they will learn to use it as a creative force. The women who criticize sexuality per se cannot even understand a female-positive Eros. They see it in terms of male pornography, which abuses women, and that's all they can imagine. But if you go back to an earlier tradition, if you go back to Sappho, if you go back to Nefertiti, if you go back to the Egyptian women who ruled, the Egyptian deities who inspired, you see that female sexuality does not have to be male dominated. The Judeo-Christian world is, in a sense, an aberration in history, in that women's sexuality has been subjugated by men. I see sexuality in a much freer sense than these feminists do. I think of the sexuality of a Sappho, a very liberating sexuality and a very pro-female sexuality. The critics to whom you refer are trapped in a kind of Judeo-Christian worldview; they think that to be prosex is to be pro-male-domination. They just don't understand. They are more oppressed by patriarchal thinking than I am.

In a 1987 interview with Contemporary Authors, you stated: "I think of myself as a poet who stumbled into the habit of writing novels. But they use different muscles, really." What did you mean by using "different muscles," and do you still think of yourself as primarily a poet?

I do apprehend the world as a poet—that is imagistically. I never outline a novel's plot first, as some thriller writers do. I always start with an image, with a sense of the language of the book, and generally with a character, and I sort of know where the arc of the story is pointing, but I never know just where it ends. I think like a poet. When I say "using different muscles," I mean that the novel can contain all kinds of things that the poem can't. The novel can be a criticism of society, the novel can include the way people cook and go to the bathroom and ride on horseback or in spaceships, and it can include all the impedimenta of the world, and you can make that part of your book's subtext. So the novel has a reach that the poem does not have. And that I find very beguiling—the impulse to create a world. In that sense you're using different muscles. The novel also allows for observation of character, which most modern lyric poetry does not. Speaking out of an "I" persona, which is an outgrowth of the poet's own "I," may go very close to the bone, but it doesn't paint a society as a whole. I guess those are the ways in which the two forms use different muscles. My poetry feeds my prose, and most of my books start, in some sense, through poetry. If I didn't go back and write poetry after every book of prose, I would be impoverished. Writing poems and keeping notes in notebooks restore me to myself. They are my compost heap. Through them, I get back to my center.

What would you say are your primary aims or goals as an author?

I would like to bring wholeness to contemporary women. I think that women have been deeply split—their minds have been split from their bodies, their sexuality has been split from their intelligence. I think Judeo-Christian culture has forced women into a kind of whore/madonna split and mind/body split. Each of my heroines is looking for integration. Fanny wants, as she always says, "reason and rump," Isadora is looking for sexuality and intellect both; she doesn't want to give up one for the other. To have sex but no intellect is like having breathing but not eating. So, I think the aim of my books is to accomplish a kind of integration and wholeness for modern women. My heroines begin their stories suffering from a lack of integration, and in the course of their adventures they come upon a new integration.

You seem to use a great deal of autobiographical information in your works. Would you describe your writing process? How do you incorporate your personal experience in your plots and characters?

I don't really know. I generally transform my life in the writing process. Sometimes I write books that seem more superficially autobiographical (in the sense that the heroines come from New York, are Jewish and bookish like me) and sometimes the autobiographical impulse is more hidden, as it is in Serenissima or Fanny or the future novel I'm writing now. Why I reach out and pick up certain elements of life and use them in the book, or how I transform them, I can't tell you—it's really an unconscious process. I try to make the heroines as real and visceral as I can. For example, I want them to have professions I know well. In Any Woman's Blues, Leila is a painter, a metier I understand very well because I come from a family of painters. In Serenissima, Jessica is an actress: I have many friends who are in the acting profession. I would probably not want to give a character of mine a profession that I didn't feel in my guts. But how I transform stuff that really happened to me, I really don't know—it's very intuitive.

How do you perceive yourself in relation to the larger picture of contemporary literature?

We live in a time when there has been a revolution in women's autobiographical writing. If you look at a book like Jill Ker Conway's anthology of women's autobiography [Written by Herself: Autobiographies of American Women, 1992], you see that this is a great age of flowering of the autobiographical impulse. Women writers have fulfilled the prophecy of Emerson ("novels will give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies"). Why? Because women have had to define themselves anew in this century. All the givens we were raised with have been swept away—notions of motherhood, notions of wifehood, notions of the stability of the family—everything has changed. So, we turn to autobiographical writing to help us define ourselves, and to help us define our womanhood in a time when female status is radically changing, and relations between the sexes are, too.