UR TV CAST

You can’t believe how many stupid people there are out there and you have to learn how to protect yourself,” she explains. “I am talking about people who find your number in the phone book and appear at your door. I wasn’t very good at that and I never expected it to happen It was really tough. There are a lot of crazy people out there who want to stalk you.”Jong says she eventually learned to ignore the fuss and attention and get on with her life, and more writing.

Her eighth novel, Sappho’s Leap, is an imagined narrative of the life of the Greek poetess who was writing her own (mostly bisexual) lexicon of love in verse 600 years before the birth of Christ She is also a prolific writer of poetry herself. Your whole soul flowed out through your tongue and into the mouth of your lover.”With that one book’s release, Jong became the prophetess of sexual fulfilment for women around the world. Its impact, at a time when the women’s movement was in full bloom, was undeniably enormous, not least on her own life, as people in almost equal numbers either applauded her for helping them explore their own uncharted sexual fantasies, or excoriated her – and here we are talking mostly about men – for writing such a “dirty” novel.”At the beginning, it was sort of a cataclysm. “The zipless fuck was more than fuck,” she told her enraptured readers “It was a Platonic ideal.

Zipless because when you came together zippers fell away like rose petals, underwear blew off in one breath like dandelion fluff Tongues intertwined and turned liquid. It is sex unbridled from all the baggage of marriage, monogamy and fidelity. “Even if you loved your husband,” she wrote at the book’s beginning, “there came that inevitable year when fucking him turned as bland as Velveeta cheese: filling, fattening even, but no thrill to the tastebuds, no bittersweet edge, no danger.”The zipless fuck is what Isadora discovers as she breaks free of her marital monotony, travels to Europe and rediscovers the heat of sex with, among other people, a stranger on a train. The book, heavy with elements of autobiography, traces the adventures of Isadora Wing who, aged 29, abandons her husband of five years because, well, he just isn’t lighting her fire any more.