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 Fear of Flying ended with the runaway wife returning to scrub her infidelities in her husband's bathtub, some feminists saw Erica Jong's novel as a washout. She may have come to agree with them, for she has since divorced her second husband and written an article in Vogue magazine on the obsolescence of marriage. She has her...