Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old work.

When Erica Jong finished writing Any Woman's Blues, her latest novel, she must have realized that there would be some debate over what the book was really about. Was it, as the helpful subtitle suggested, a "novel of obsession" about a successful woman, Leila Sand, in love with a hopeless cad named Dart Donegal? Was it about Leila's...