Fear of Flying

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Five years of marriage had made me itchy for all those things: itchy for men, and itchy for solitude. Itchy for sex and itchy for the life of a recluse. I knew my itches were contradictory—and that made things even worse. I knew my itches were un-American—and that made things stil l worse. It is heresy in America to embrace any way of life except as half of a couple. Solitude is un-American. It may be condoned in a man—especially if he is a ‘glamorous bachelor’ who ‘dates starlets’ during a brief interval between marriages. But a woman is always presumed to be alone as a result of abandonment, not choice. And she is treated that way: as a pariah. There is simply no dignified way for a woman to live alone. Oh, she can get along financially perhaps (though not nearly as well as a man), but emotionally she is never left in peace. Her friends, her family, her fellow workers never let her forget that her husbandlessness, her childlessness—her sel f ishness , in short—is a reproach to the American way of life. Is this a book only a young writer could write? Is there anything in the book that embarrasses you now?

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, six 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, and the New York Times Book Review.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.” You went on to write two more books about Isadora Wing. What makes a character someone you want to revisit?

Brodesser-Akner alos heralds the novel’s remarkable cultural impact in her introduction, writing: “At its most basic, Fear of Flying is a trailblazing, historic account of what it meant to grapple with the complexities and contradictions of what women were told they should want and what they actually do… She made this grappling accessible to a mass audience of women who, for the first time, understood that they weren’t alone.”

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The rudeness wasn’t just in the sex, either; she is unbelievably rude about the Germans. I also loved the way she started sentences with “and”, as well as using slang and other things we’d been taught were capital crimes against good taste and grammar. This was my first encounter with a way of writing that was simultaneously posh and not posh. Since then, many of the early feminist novels have acquired “classic of the genre” status, but none has become an international cultural phenomenon on the scale of Fear of Flying. By 1977, Jong’s book had been translated into twelve languages and had sold six million copies. The collapse of communism created another surge in celebrity and sales as the novel became available in former Soviet Republics and East European countries. Fear of Flying has now sold more than eighteen million copies and is available in thirty languages. In 2008, Jong told an interviewer that wherever she travels—Belgrade, Hong Kong, Tokyo—people still want her to know how completely they identify with the novel’s protagonist. “I am Isadora Wing,” they say. I have no doubt this is true. The book ends on an ambiguous note. What do you think happens when Bennett walks in on Isadora? Why? Is the ending affirmative or a come-uppance? Is the bathtub scene a rebirth as some have said? Jong supports LGBT rights and legalization of same-sex marriage. She says, "Gay marriage is a blessing not a curse. It certainly promotes stability and family. And it's certainly good for kids." [11] Bibliography [ edit ] Erica Jong visiting Barnes & Noble in New York. Jennifer Weiner and Erica Jong at the Miami Book Fair International 2013 Fiction [ edit ]

Jong has been married four times. After a brief marriage to Michael Werthman while at Barnard, and another in 1966 to Allan Jong, a Chinese American psychiatrist, in 1977 she married Jonathan Fast, a novelist, social work educator, and son of novelist Howard Fast. [1] This marriage was described in How to Save Your Own Life and Parachutes and Kisses. She has a daughter from her third marriage, Molly Jong-Fast. Jong is now married to Kenneth David Burrows, a New York litigator. [9] a b c cunytv75 (2013-10-21), One to One: Erica Jong "Fear of Flying" 40th Anniversary, archived from the original on 2021-12-21 , retrieved 2017-11-16 {{ citation}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list ( link) Seymour Mann Passes Away - 2004-03-01 05:00:00". Gifts and Dec. Archived from the original on March 22, 2009 . Retrieved October 19, 2013. The Jewish science,’ as anti-Semites call it. Turn every question upside down and shove it up the asker’s ass. Analysts all seem to be Talmudists who flunked out of seminary in the first year. I was reminded of one of my grandfather’s favorite gags:

Yet if the novel is a cop-out from a feminist perspective, if Isadora’s consciousness hasn’t risen much by the end, why have millions of women found her story inspiring and liberating? Why do graduate students in Belgrade, housewives in Hong Kong, and female business entrepreneurs in Tokyo identify with this upper-middle-class Jewish New Yorker with a kvetching habit? Why do they still love her today? In May 2013 it was announced [10] that a screenplay version by Piers Ashworth had been green-lighted by Blue-Sky Media, with Laurie Collyer directing.