In the book, you rail against writers being typecast, but doesn’t the title invite typecasting? But you see them weakening and weakening and weakening. As somebody who loved Keats, I was very aware of mortality, but I think as a novelist, I started to be really aware as my parents were failing, and I used some of that material about my own parents, although Vanessa’s parents are not exactly my parents. If you think like a poet, you always think of mortality. The only subjects of poetry are love and death. When did you start thinking about mortality a lot? Jong talked about the book by phone from her home on New York’s Upper East Side. And her prolific creator - novelist, poet and feminist Erica Jong - has other things on her mind these days, as evidenced by her new novel, “Fear of Dying.” Jong’s latest work of fiction follows her 60-year-old protagonist, Vanessa Wonderman, as she navigates the way stations of her parents’ deaths, her grandchild’s birth and late-in-life sexuality. More than four decades have passed since Isadora Wing fantasized in “Fear of Flying” about zipless adventures, spotlighting women’s sexuality and helping to further the sexual revolution.
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