Back when Erica Jong was a lush literary Lolita penning the It novel, she had a certain somethin' going on. She had a way with words: "Fear of Flying," her feminist manifesto, sold 18 million copies worldwide. And she had a way with men: four husbands and dalliances with other women's husbands. (Martha Stewart is allegedly still ticked.) Back then, Jong has boasted, she smelled of sex. Pheromones-a-go-go. But with time comes both change and regrets, and, well, the Italians, they don't stalk her through the streets of Venice anymore, fingers grasping at ripe rump flesh.

As Jong, who turned 64 Friday, sees it, this is a blessing:

"There's something nice about the freedom of getting older," she says, doing a jaunt through Washington last week to plug her memoir, "Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life."

Notwithstanding the spate of tucked and nipped celebs extolling the fabulousness of being 50-plus, "American society is very ageist. ... But I don't care. My needs are different now."

"The zipless (romp) could not interest me less," says Jong, who coined the catch phrase back in 1973.

But mature sex, committed sex, with all its zippered encumbrances, interests her plenty. She's been married to husband No. 4, divorce lawyer Ken Burrows, for 17 years, and the days spent shagging married men, unmarried men, way older men, way younger men — not to mention the occasional tryst with a girlfriend — have given way to years of contented monogamy. She's here to tell you that open marriage is a crock, though she's still a big proponent of sexual freedom: Make love, not war in Iraq. Age brings with it experience, hopefully wisdom, and for Jong, at long last, she says, real intimacy. For her 10th wedding anniversary, she and her husband burned the prenup.

As she enthuses in "Seducing the Demon," a rambling, riotous confessional of one writer's life, sex after 60 is delicious, karmic, a total melding of sense and spirit. Sure, certain body parts might not work as well, but a willing spirit makes up for weak flesh. She used to think the whole tantric sex thing was "utter bull ... raising the kundalini, yoga poses in tandem, mysteries of the East and all that rot."

Then she tried it.

"It's really not about some technique," says Jong, who divides her time between Manhattan and Connecticut. "It's being so close to someone that you can feel what they feel. There are spiritual things that you can't describe."

This both thrills and horrifies Jong's 27-year-old daughter, writer Molly Jong-Fast, who chronicled her unconventional childhood with her mother, traipsing between New York and Venice, mom's young boyfriends in tow, in her second book, retitled "Girl (Maladjusted): True Stories From a Semi-Celebrity Childhood" for its paperback release this year.

With "Fear of Flying," "she was so sexy; that was her shtick," Jong-Fast says in an enthusiastic gush. "She's starting to come into her own again. Most people don't get to come into their own twice. She's sort of this sexy, older voice for octogenarian sex. Which is really disturbing to me."

It is pointed out that her mother's no octogenarian.

"No ..." says Jong-Fast, who lives with her husband and toddler son just blocks from her mother's Manhattan home.

Not eighty-something. But older. A mom. A grandmother. No one, Jong-Fast says, wants to think of their parents having sex. When she was 15, she started reading "Fear" and couldn't bear to finish it. It had to be at least partly autobiographical, right? The horror.

Still, even if Jong-Fast can't bring herself to read her mother's writing — she doesn't want to censor her mother, and she knows she would be tempted — she's happy that other people are reading her mother — 18 novels, tomes of poetry and memoirs after "Fear."

"I feel like, 'Finally, people get her.' She's totally honest, and weird and great. They finally get her, warts and all."

But not everyone gets Jong and her particular brand of brash and bawdy honesty. She is alternately viewed as the patron saint of feminine sexual autonomy and the poster girl for runaway self-absorption. Kirkus Reviews praises "Demon" as a "zesty, savvy, freewheeling memoir of the writing life," while the Chicago Sun-Times scolds, "Jong today is a mess."

Critics were no less schizoid in 1973: In a New York Times review, Henry Miller declared that "Fear" was just like his "Tropic of Cancer," but "not as bitter and much funnier," while critic Paul Theroux dismissed Jong's heroine, Isadora Wing, as "a mammoth pudenda."

"First of all, 'Fear of Flying' was a seminal book," says playwright Eve Ensler, who invited Jong to perform in an off-Broadway presentation of "The Vagina Monologues." "It completely got women to think about their sexuality and their bodies and freedom in a whole new way."

Jong came of literary age at 31 with "Fear of Flying," pushing herself front and center into the sexual zeitgeist with Isadora Wing, who yearned for anonymous, ecstatic sex, where buttons and braces flew open magically and, after the last hurrah, phantom lovers melted away with no repercussions.

Her own life followed a similar trajectory, with sometimes painful results. She was living with husband No. 3, screenwriter Jonathan Fast, before she'd divorced husband No. 2. She was arrested in Beverly Hills and charged with DUI after one too many glasses of wine in 2004. She slept with a publisher who happened to be married at the time to Martha Stewart, her Barnard College classmate. Stewart reportedly told everyone, Jong says, that she'd wrecked Stewart's marriage. (Stewart's publicist did not return a phone call requesting comment.) Jong writes about it now, in "Demon," because for the past 22 years, everyone's been asking her, "What the hell happened between you and Martha Stewart?" And with this book, which began as a self-help book for young writers and morphed into a memoir, she decided to tell the truth as she saw it.

"It was one of the biggest mistakes of my life," she says, ruefully. "It was truly stupid. And it was hurtful."

In person, it appears that time has treated her kindly: She's pretty, soft and curvily compact, her face all rosy cheeks and pampered glow. But her impressive decolletage provides a leathery contrast, mute evidence of seasons past spent worshipping the sun.

As a young writer, she says, older women writers treated her horribly. Rebuffed, Jong, who studied poetry as a graduate student at Columbia University, sought mentorship in Henry Miller.

So what does Jong see as the headline for the next wave of feminism? Mentorship.

Mentorship?

She explains: It's about taking the next generation by the hand and escorting it into the future. Showing an interest. And telling the truth about the past.

"Feminism has to be about the next generation," Jong says before heading off to her next destination. "There's a lot of discrimination that comes from other women. Women hate themselves. They see a woman that's lived a rich life" and they go on the attack. "But I don't want to trash other women. I think that abundance and generosity reverse that karma."