What Do Women Want? Bread, Roses, Sex, Power - Hardcover

Erica Jong burst onto the American literary and cultural scene with her audacious bestseller Fear of Flying and has been cast as a feminist spokesperson ever since--a curious conundrum for a bawdy, sometimes raging intellectual who failed so miserably to repudiate men that she married repeatedly and worried so much about growing older that she signed up for plastic surgery. Yet it's these very inconsistencies that have made her less didactic over time. The brief essays in What Do Women Want? veer from contemplation of the impossible tightrope of motherhood, the accursed nature of Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the unexpurgated Anaïs Nin to the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't life of literary women and the fatal charm of Italy. There's also a surprisingly sweet paean to that horny old goat, Henry Miller (the subject of Jong's biographical study The Devil at Large).

This is Jong at her best and worst, alternately flailing wildly and landing squarely on the mark. "It's hard to be a novelist in the age of soap opera," she observes, commenting on American President Clinton's sexual peccadilloes. "The slow accretion of 500 well-wrought words a day seems pointless beside the dizzying and breathless plot lines served up by the evening news." The delicious irony of the book's title is no accident; it's a question Sigmund Freud asked and never satisfactorily answered. Neither does Jong, but her cultural commentary has flashes of brilliance and the moxie necessary to cut to the head of the line. --Francesca Coltrera

Erica Jong, award-winning poet, novelist, and essayist, is best known for seven bestselling novels, including her most recent, Inventing Memory, and her midlife memoir, Fear of Fifty. She is a former president of the Authors Guild and frequent lecturer on women's rights, authors' rights, and free expression both here and abroad. She lives in New York City and Connecticut.