Sugar in My Bowl by Erica Jong Read Free Book Online

running through her mind as she is making love. Very little physical description of the act accompanies this stream of consciousness, but the character’s very thoughts are enough to drive Wallace’s small-minded bureaucrats and PTA types into a collective frenzy. A woman’s mind, in other words, is the ultimate sex organ. Fifteen years on, with my unacknowledged erotic novel behind me and the even more daunting task of writing sex scenes for real and complex literary characters before me, I decided that this was the only approach I could possibly take.
    This decision, and not my decision to write a novel about sex and publish it under another woman’s name, was the catalyst that enabled me to confront this material, and in the years since I have been alternately amused and amazed to find myself called a writer of persuasive erotic scenes. I accept this appraisal. I know I write these scenes well, and not only because I’ve been told so more times than I can count. I also know because I read the sex scenes in other people’s novels, and I find them generally horrendous. (Ironically enough, a long sex scene in Wallace’s The Seven Minutes, between the hero-attorney and his fiancée, is one of the worst I’ve ever encountered.) And I know because, well . . . I just know. It may embarrass the hell out of me, but the evidence is clear: when it comes to literary beds, I’m frankly good in them.
    Eventually, when the agent with the wonderful list of authors finally dumped me as a client—two novels rejected by everyone on the planet proved too much for him, in the end—I was forced to tell my next agent about my erotic novel I’d published, but thank goodness she never asked to see a copy. Over the years, I confided in one or two friends, always laughing about it, swearing them to secrecy, never once revealing the pseudonym or the title. Once, a British tabloid contacted my husband about a rumor that his wife had written a pornographic novel, and my husband, who was extremely upset, was forced to fend them off. I don’t know where the rumor came from, or where it went. And once, in the departure lounge at Heathrow Airport, I was loitering in the Newsagent, trying to find something to buy that exactly fit the handful of English change I had left over, when I happened to look up at the top rack of the bookshelves. This was where they kept erotic novels, paperbacks with scantily clad women and men on their covers. The books had titles like Hard to Please and Everything She Wanted . One of them was mine. I stared at it. I had never seen this edition. Its cover showed a woman in something that looked like a leather bikini and thigh-high leather boots. She was holding a whip. She appeared extremely annoyed. I bought a copy of my favorite British magazine ( BBC Homes & Antiques ) and returned to my seat, irrationally imagining that the link between myself and the woman with the whip was obvious to all.
    So, am I ashamed of what I did? Not exactly. I wrote a novel in two weeks that was pretty well put together, that still pays me royalty checks (albeit very little ones) twenty years later, and—far more important—that gave me the blast of courage that I needed to set aside my two scorned novels (which, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, were never to see the light of print) and write a plot-driven book that would be the first of my four published novels (so far!).
    So, am I proud of what I did? Not exactly. I still cringe when I remember some of the things in that novel and think about how horrified I would be if someone who knew I had written it actually read it. Because, although I am the twenty-years-married author of an erotic novel (not to mention racy scenes in my acknowledged novels), I am still, as I always shall be, the most straightlaced person I know.
    A few years ago I had a sadly telling conversation with my friend Elisa. We were talking about Sex and the City, and I was taking issue with the