What is freedom? Not just in terms of determining what sorts of intimate and sexual relationships one wishes to enjoy, but how can we meaningfully articulate a vision for living a thriving, full, contented life, in all of its complexity and with all of our foibles? How does one balance personal pursuits with spending time with one's lover? How can we successfully negotiate the time and energy necessary to nurture a marriage while simultaneously building a career (particularly if one is an artist)? How do the answers to these timeless and universal questions change when asked by a woman?
Upon its release in 1973, Erica Jong´s debut novel Fear of Flying garnered praise from respected literary figures John Updike and Henry Miller as well as became a popular bestseller in the culture. Many readers identified with the book´s semi-autobiographical heroine, a 29-year-old woman possessing intellect, wit, and an indefatigable passion to understand the nature of her desires. Isadora Wing is married, a Jewish New Yorker, a writer–but which of these is the most important? How do women balance them all together, and how can one wrest satisfaction from both one´s career and one´s relationships?
The book begins in Vienna. Isadora is attending a conference on psychoanalysis with her husband Bennet, ostensibly to write an article for a media outlet in New York. The choice of setting combined with her spouse´s profession is intentional by Jong, as Isadora´s narration will jump back and forth through time, and some chapters will be so confessional that they will almost feel like we are her therapist, listening to her on the couch. Shortly after her arrival to the event, Isadora meets Adrian, a British analyst who is the opposite in temperament to her husband: where Bennet is meek or submissive, this new man is confident, direct in articulating what he wants, an existentialist who invites Isadora to run away with him for a temporary affair. She joins him in the hopes of having a highly-charged sexual adventure, an act of rebellion which will shock her into realizing what is most important to her, what role her husband plays in her life, and more. But instead, Isadora finds that she and Adrian are simply driving around France and Germany, and that their lovemaking is infrequent or brief, if at all (Adrian is frequently impotent). When the Brit announces that he is going to return to his wife and children in England, Isadora storms off to a ramshackle room in a fleabag hotel in Paris, where she finally begins to fall in love with the one person she has been seeking all along: herself.
Fear of Flying originated the term the “zipless fuck,” and a significant portion of Jong´s book explores Isadora´s craving for anonymous, no strings attached sex with a man. But the book understands that sex is never without context, and that Isadora is really searching for a different level of experience, and is seeking a greater level of connection and personal understanding. In both temperament and subject matter, readers of Fear of Flying will quickly see how Jong blazed the trail for a number of subsequent books and writers that have followed in the generations that followed, from Candace Bushnell´s “Sex and the City” column and Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones Diary, to Phoebe Waller-Bridge´s Fleabag.
Christian Pan is a writer based in New York City who has published six novellas and nearly one hundred short stories focused on the erotic imagination since 2021. He also hosts the monthly Pulse Session for the podcast All the Filthy Details, and under another name works in the entertainment business.
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