My relationship with Erica.

Erica Jong is a bad influence. She is the embodiment of carpe diem, at its most desperate. Reading her words will find you sabotaging everything for the smallest chance of discovering something better. Addictive. potentially threatening to a stable state of mind. I am drawn to 'Fear of flying' often. It is my bible, and my cocaine. It deserves to be re-read, to have its chapters plucked at random, to end up dog eared and bent, to be gasped at on the train, and lovingly stroked, and slapped to the floor.

She is my favourite female writer. I adore and loathe her. I will never write as well. I hold her books and I despair. The sheer brilliance of Erica, is that she tells the bone-deep truth. The kind of secrets we can't even admit to ourselves, she brazenly exhibits and languorously entertains for pages. I blush through this book, realising myself, realising that this is what it sounds like when you denounce fear.

I need to bottle it, and drink it.

Each chapter is a different dare. You will start to over-analyse yourself. You will think endlessly on all the things you're not doing, the adventures you're not having, and crave them all the more. And therein lies the itch, the restless twitch. In 'Fear of Flying' Isadora (who is Erica, shrouding her real life under the term 'fiction'), gives in to hers. She is a dramatic mess, but dancing on the knife edge of life throughout. What if we began to give into our every whim, no matter the consequence, no regard for the moral compass in the moment, only instantly after to be terrorised by guilt, regret, despair. Erica risks for me, and I feel the pull. To live with such disregard, all for those few seconds of adrenaline, and then have reality bleed in and burn.

Her perspective is striking, her perils humiliating. She has time to share the gory details, and you have not heard it told this way before.

I could read this book and forget myself entirely. Escapism at its most corrupt.

I can't even categorise this as a book review. It's a way of life. I despise her for polluting my mind with possibility. I blame her. And now I have to go and read something I don't believe in, just to balance it out.