Fear of Flying

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Upon arriving, Isadora meets the English Langian analyst Adrian Goodlove and is immediately hooked. Despite his gruff attitude and dirty sandals, he seems to provide what she desires but does not find in her own marriage: energy, excitement, desire, danger. They begin a poorly-veiled secret affair by dancing and kissing rather openly at conference events, staying out nights, and spending days by German pools. Adrian is wild and awakens things in Isadora she believed to be lost in the everydayness of her marriage although he is a rotten lay and often impotent. Isadora became an icon for women searching for freedom. I wanted to show how she dealt with motherhood, divorce, addiction, new relationships. Because she was so important to so many readers, I felt her story had to go on. You went on to write two more books about Isadora Wing. What makes a character someone you want to revisit?

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. But what was so great about marriage? I had been married and married. It had its good points, but it also had its bad. The virtues of marriage were mostly negative virtues. Being unmarried in a man's world was such a hassle that anything had to be better. Marriage was better. But not much. Damned clever, I thought, how men had made life so intolerable for single women that most would gladly embrace even bad marriages instead. Almost anything had to be an improvement on hustling for your own keep at some low-paid job and fighting off unattractive men in your spare time while desperately trying to ferret out the attractive ones. Though I've no doubt that being single is just as lonely for a man, it doesn't have the added extra wallop of being downright dangerous, and it doesn't automatically imply poverty and the unquestioned status of a social pariah. There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I’d been treated by at least six of them. And married a seventh. God knows it was a tribute either to the shrinks’ ineptitude or my own glorious unanalyzability that I was now, if anything, more scared of flying than when I began my analytic adventures some thirteen years earlier. Erica Jong Helps Barnard's Budding Writers". Columbia University Record. October 11, 1996 . Retrieved May 22, 2022. Eventually, she decides to return home to Bennett. On a train journey to meet him in London, she is approached by an attendant who sexually assaults her, which propels her into her own psychological self-examination.The novel's tone may be considered conversational or informal. The story's American narrator is struggling to find her place in the world of academia, feminist scholarship, and in the literary world as a whole. The narrator is a female author of erotic poetry, which she publishes without fully realizing how much attention she will attract from both critics and writers of alarming fan letters. I know some good marriages. Second marriages mostly. Marriages where both people have outgrown the bullshit of me-Tarzan, you-Jane and are just trying to get through their days by helping each other, being good to each other, doing the chores as they come up and not worrying too much about who does what. Some men reach that delightfully relaxed state of affairs about age forty or after a couple of divorces. Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you're going to die anyway.” Erica Jong Marries Kenneth Burrows". The New York Times. August 6, 1989. Archived from the original on November 13, 2013. Initially I was troubled by some people’s emphasis on sex in the novel. I never thought it was a book about sex. I thought it was a book about freedom. As time went on I came to see that Isadora’s fierce honesty about her sexual feelings had so impacted readers that conservatives felt they had to denounce her —and me. There’s less fornication in the book than there is fantasy. Perhaps it’s as threatening to have a woman talk and think freely about sex as to actually do it. At any rate, Isadora’s openness did change the way both women and men thought, talked, and wrote about sex. Megan's Book of Divorce: a kid's book for adults; as told to Erica Jong; illustrated by Freya Tanz. New York: New American Library (1984)

Haemmerli, Thomas (March 21, 2023). "Kaspar Kasics on his film on Erica Jong" (Video) . Retrieved March 21, 2023. I find myself wondering how many other memories are hidden from me in the recesses of my own brain; indeed my own brain will seem to be the last great terra incognita, and I will be filled with wonder at the prospect of some day discovering new worlds there. Imagine the lost continent of Atlantis and all the submerged islands of childhood right there waiting to be found. The inner space we have never adequately explored. The worlds within worlds within worlds. And the marvelous thing is that they are waiting for us. If we fail to discover them, it is only because we haven't yet built the right vehicle - spaceship or submarine or poem - which will take us to them. Women seem much freer today than they were in 1973. Why do you think Isadora’s dilemmas still have relevance?

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Updike, in the more sensible bits of his critique, compared this to Portnoy’s Complaint, but it also had roots in The Adventures of Augie March and – as the author herself liked to point out – in the picaresque novels of the 18th century. Originally published in 1973, the ground-breaking, uninhibited story of Isadora Wing and her desire to fly free caused a national sensation —and sold more than twelve million copies. Now, after thirty years, the iconic novel still stands as a timeless tale of self-discovery, liberation, and womanhood. Megan's Two Houses: a story of adjustment; illustrated by Freya Tanz (1984; West Hollywood, CA: Dove Kids, 1996)