Fear of Dying - Erica Jong

Written by Erica Jong
Read by Suzanne Toren
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Lengh: 7 hr., 19 min
Publisher:Brilliance Audio
Date, 2015.

Fear of Dying is a hilarious, heart wrenching, and beautifully told story about what happens when one woman steps reluctantly into the afternoon of life.

Vanessa Wonderman is a gorgeous former actress in her 60’s who finds herself balancing between her dying parents, her aging husband and her beloved, pregnant daughter. Although Vanessa considers herself “a happily married woman,” the lack of sex in her life makes her feel as if she’s losing something too valuable to ignore. So she places an ad for sex on a site called Zipless.com and the life she knew begins to unravel.

With the help and counsel of her best friend, Isadora Wing, Vanessa navigates the phishers and pishers, and starts to question if what she’s looking for might be close at hand after all.

Fear of Dying is a daring and delightful look at what it really takes to be human and female in the 21st century. Wildly funny and searingly honest, this is a book for everyone who has ever been shaken and changed by love.

“When she married a billionaire 20 years her senior, she recognized that she was choosing love and comfort over adventure. But now her parents are dying and her husband’s had a heart attack and she’s reconsidering the choices she’s made. As the title suggests, this novel is a bookend to Jong’s scandalous debut. Isadora Wing, the protagonist from Fear of Flying, reappears-older and wiser-as Vanessa’s best friend. Desperate to feel vital in the midst of decay and death, Vanessa places a personals ad on zipless.com (another reference, of course, to Jong’s first novel). What follows is the heroine reflecting on her slightly wild past and her mildly terrifying present as she auditions potential lovers who range from the disappointing to the alarming. …. , but spending almost 300 pages with Vanessa is like enduring a trans-Atlantic flight with a seatmate who never stops talking but doesn’t have a whole lot to say. … Vanessa wonders at the fact that she and Isadora are able to speak candidly of S&M; neither Vanessa nor her author seems to know that this is now the stuff of prime-time TV. Jong does have interesting-even arresting-things to say about age and dying. They’re just hard to find in this overlong and self-satisfied novel. Not without its moments. ….. Kirkus Reviews

For those who asked, I don’t find a recording for Fear of Fifty.