Inventing Memory: A Novel of Mothers and Daughters [Audio Cassette]

Erica Jong (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1997

Inventing Memory: A Novel of Mothers and Daughters is the epic of a Jewish family in America, told through the stories of four generations of women from the turn of the last century to the early years of the 21st century. Simultaneous hardcover release from HarperCollins. 4 cassettes.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

In Jong's newest work, four generations of talented, beautiful Jewish women?Sarah, Salome, Sally, and Sara?fill ten decades with tragic, action-packed lives shaped by the challenges of Jewish history and the misery created by the deeply flawed men they choose. In the early 1900s, Sarah flees a deadly pogrom in Russia and paints her way to fame and fortune in America. Sarah's daughter, Salome, sleeps and writes her way through literary Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Salome's daughter, Sally, a tormented product of the Sixties, drowns her soul in a numbing mess of drugs, men, and alcohol while skyrocketing to the top of the music charts. In the new millennium, Sally's child, Sara, with her own daughter in tow, leaves a failing marriage and spurns the love of the only wholly decent man in this tale to unravel the secrets of Judaism and feminism that molded her famous relatives. Jong is a gifted writer who tells a captivating story, but one does have to question her reluctance to part with her now-tired insistence on peppering her novels with scenes of gratuitous vulgarity. It worked in Fear of Flying, but nearly a quarter of a century later, it would have been nice to be able to recommend this title to a broader audience.
-?Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., Mich.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Jong should stick to nonfiction. Her last book, Fear of Fifty (1994), was a frank and well-constructed memoir. Her new novel evinces none of the smarts or style she is capable of, in fact, this multigenerational family saga spanning the entire twentieth century is a maddening mishmash of trivialized history and cliched fantasy. And that's a shame, because several of Jong's characters, Jewish women who exemplify chutzpah and creativity, are engaging and thoroughly enjoyable, particularly the indomitable Sarah who escapes the pogroms of Russia, makes her way alone to America at the tender age of 15, and becomes a successful portrait painter. If Jong had told Sarah's story, and the story of her flapper-writer daughter Salome, and her musician daughter Sally, and her scholarly daughter Sara, in a lucid and dramatic manner, this would have been a fine work of pop fiction. Instead, Jong chose to connect her narrative to every watershed event of the last 100 years, dragging in real people such as Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein for silly cameos, imitating (badly) D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller, and using (clumsily) such devices as letters, journals entries, and even a fake interview to stand in for solid, straight-ahead writing. There are some sunny moments when Jong captures the atmosphere of certain times and places, quotes clever Yiddish proverbs, or actually offers some insights into love and the bond between mothers and daughters, but by trying to do too much, she has done too little. Donna Seaman --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Audio Cassette
• Publisher: Audio Literature (April 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 078711457X
• ISBN-13: 978-0787114572
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 4.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,120,433 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #8 in Books > Books on Cassette > Authors, A-Z > ( J ) > Jong, Erica

More About the Author

ERICA JONG
(Bio used www.ericajong.com)
Erica Jong--novelist, poet, and essayist--has consistently used her craft to help provide women with a powerful and rational voice in forging a feminist consciousness. She has published 21 books, including eight novels, seven volumes of poetry, six books of non-fiction and numerous articles in magazines and newspapers such as The New York Times, The Sunday Times of London, Elle, Vogue, The New York Times Book Review and The Wall Street Journal.
In her groundbreaking first novel, Fear of Flying (20 million in print around the world in more than forty languages), she introduced Isadora Wing, who also plays a central part in three subsequent novels--How to Save Your Own Life, Parachutes and Kisses, and Any Woman's Blues. In her three historical novels--Fanny, Shylock's Daughter, and Sappho's Leap--she demonstrates her mastery of eighteenth-century British literature, the verses of Shakespeare, and ancient Greek lyric, respectively. Erica's latest book, a memoir of her life as a writer, Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life, came out in March 2006. It was a national bestseller in the US and many other countries.
A graduate of Barnard College and Columbia University's Graduate Faculties where she received her M.A. in 18th Century English Literature, Erica Jong also attended Columbia's graduate writing program where she studied poetry with Stanley Kunitz and Mark Strand. In 2008, continuing her long-standing relationship with the university, a large collection of Erica's archival material was acquired by Columbia University's Rare Book & Manuscript Library, where it will be available to graduate and undergraduate students. Ms. Jong plans to teach master classes at Columbia and also advise the Rare Book Library on the acquisition of other women writers' archives.

Calling herself "a defrocked academic," Ms. Jong has partly returned to her roots as a scholar. She has taught at Ben Gurion University in Israel, Bennington College in the U.S., Breadloaf Writers' Conference in Vermont and many other distinguished writing programs and universities. She loves to teach and lecture, though her skill in these areas has sometimes crowded her writing projects. "As long as I am communicating the gift of literature, I'm happy," Jong says. A poet at heart, Ms. Jong believes that words can save the world.

Known for her commitment to women's rights, authors' rights and free expression, Ms. Jong is a frequent lecturer in the U.S. and abroad. She served as president of The Authors' Guild from 1991 to 1993 and still serves on the Board. She established a program for young writers at her alma mater, Barnard College. The Erica Mann Jong Writing Center at Barnard teaches students the art of peer tutoring and editing.
Erica Jong was honored with the United Nations Award for Excellence in Literature. She has also received Poetry magazine's Bess Hokin Prize, also won by W.S. Merwin and Sylvia Plath. In France, she received the Deauville Award for Literary Excellence and in Italy, she received the Sigmund Freud Award for Literature. The City University of New York awarded Ms. Jong an honorary PhD at the College of Staten Island. In June 2009, Erica won the first Fernanda Pivano Prize for Literature in Italy.

Currently Ms. Jong is working on a novel featuring "a woman of a certain age." Its working title is secret. Fear of Flying is in preparation as a BBC mini-series. Her first anthology, Sugar In My Bowl: Real Women Write About Real Sex, will be published on June 14th, 2011.
Erica Jong lives in New York City and Weston, CT with her husband, attorney Ken Burrows, and standard poodle, Belinda Barkowitz. Her daughter, Molly Jong-Fast, is also a writer.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A disappointment, March 27, 2000

By 

Lynn Adler - See all my reviews

This review is from: Inventing Memory: A Novel of Mothers and Daughters (Hardcover)

It has been many years since Fear of Flying came out and my reading of it at the time, a funny, irreverent, and poignant feminist manifesto that was very apropos reading for the young woman that I was. Twenty-five plus years later in Inventing Memory, Erica Jong appears to be evaluating what it all means through searching for roots in four generations of a fictional family with an immigrant great grandmother matriarch. That is all well and good, but the style rarely shifts from the mood of what I recall from Fear of Flying. Jong never stops reminding us that it is the women who carry the generations forward, and the heck with those fickle men. Too convenient and too simplistic. And, also, ala Jong, they all must be outrageous women. My other two complaints were as such: Jong frequently has to spell out - in case you all didn't get it! - what she means by "inventing memory". I like the phrase and the possible permutations of its meaning, but I would have preferred to have it left to the reader. Finally, I came away feeling that I hardly knew the characters, particularly the four women, so I wound up finding them shallow, and not caring a lot about them. Perhaps great granddaughter Sarah we learn the most about and I think she's the most sympathetic character.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Jong blasts into the immigrant novel genre., November 12, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Inventing Memory: A Novel of Mothers and Daughters (Mass Market Paperback)

Erica Jong blasts into the immigrant novel genre in her book Inventing Memory A Novel of Mothers and Daughters. As only she can do, Jong intertwines this feminist history of four generations of Jewish-American women as they strive to learn who they are, where they came from, and the men that influenced their lives both positively and negatively. This eternal man-woman struggle pulses through the novel from beginning to end, and is laden with Jongs' usual dose of sexual heaviness. Both mothers and daughters learn from their quests to truly know their ancestors, that they are all just synthesized versions of those that came before them. The "memory" that is invented in this novel, is one that allows all these women to survive in a male-dominated world while maintaining what is most precious to the, their feminity.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Only Mindless Fun, May 23, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Inventing Memory: A Novel of Mothers and Daughters (Mass Market Paperback)

If you want something to read that is fun but not a work of art, I think you've found it. Jong keeps her reputation as a soft porn queen though, fyi. During passages of this grandmother telling her life story, she breaks into somewhat explicit descriptions -- which were seriously out of the grandmother's character. I found the whole book a bit contrived. You'll enjoy this book, but don't expect any new revelations.