Any Woman's Blues: A Novel of Obsession »

Erica Jong's twentieth and most recent book, Seducing the Demon, is a "brutally funny, searingly sensual, [and] fiercely honest memoir," said the New York Post. And the Los Angeles Times praised it as "irreverent, risqué, and wonderfully unrepentant. . . . We should all try to live up to [Erica's] standard of self-awareness." Jong has written three novels featuring Isadora Wing, her fictional doppelgänger: Fear of Flying, with more than 18 million copies in print worldwide, and How to Save Your Own Life and Parachutes and Kisses, both recently reissued by Tarcher/Penguin. Jong, who lives in New York City and Connecticut with her husband, is now at work on a novel featuring Isadora as a woman of a "certain age."

Any Woman's Blues, first published in 1990, is a tale of addiction and narcissism-the twin obsessions of ourage. World-famous folk singer Leila Sand emerged from the sixties and seventies with addictions to drugs and booze. Leila's latest addiction is to a younger man who leaves her sexually ecstatic but emotionally bereft. The orgasmic frenzies trump the betrayals, so she keeps coming back for more.

Eventually, Leila frees herself by learning the rules of love, the Twelve Steps, and the Key to Serenity in an odyssey that takes her from AA meetings to dens of sin, parties with "names" worth dropping, and erotic gondola rides.