Fear of Flying

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Erica Jong Marries Kenneth Burrows". The New York Times. August 6, 1989. Archived from the original on November 13, 2013. Jong, Erica" in Current Biography Yearbook 1997. New York / Dublin: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1997. p. 248

Nichols, Alex (September 26, 2017). "The Strange Life of Peter Daou". The Outline . Retrieved December 20, 2018. 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? As I read the notebook, I began to be drawn into it as into a novel…. And then a curious revelation started to dawn. I stopped blaming myself; it was that simple.Jong, Erica (May 18, 2008). "Hurrah for Gay Marriage". The Huffington Post . Retrieved October 18, 2013.

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 ] a b c "Erica Jong papers, 1955–2018 bulk 1965–2004". Columbia University Libraries Archival Collections. Columbia University . Retrieved May 22, 2022. The decision was, of course, further complicated by analysis—the basic assumption of analysis being (and never mind all the evidence to the contrary) that you’re getting better all the time. The refrain goes something like this:

Her works have appeared all over the world and are as popular in Eastern Europe, Japan, China, and other Asian countries as they have been in the United States and Western Europe. She has lectured, taught and read her work all over the world. 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. 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. The political battle over women's bodies today has also renewed the book's relevance in Jong's mind, constituting a 40th anniversary redistribution of the book. "All these states are introducing crazy anti-abortion rules... passing laws that they know are unconstitutional, shutting down Planned Parenthood clinics, and making it very hard...to get birth control." She cites those types of political moves as a regression from the progress set out by the Sexual Revolution. She also still feels that female authors are "second-class citizens in the publishing world," as Jennifer Weiner says in the introduction to the 40th anniversary edition: "it's very hard, if you write about women and women's struggles, to be seen as important with a capital 'I'." [5] Character models [ edit ] The main thing, however, is that it was very funny. I probably missed two-thirds of the references, but the tone – that flat, sardonic edge that made everything seem like a hilarious in-joke – was applied to things I thought you couldn’t joke about. For example, 30 years after the end of the second world war, Jong wrote about the emotional fallout among American Jews whose parents had lived through it.

Erica Jong (née Mann; born March 26, 1942) is an American novelist, satirist, and poet, known particularly for her 1973 novel Fear of Flying. The book became famously controversial for its attitudes towards female sexuality and figured prominently in the development of second-wave feminism. According to The Washington Post, it has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. [2] Early life and education [ edit ] 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 2007, 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. Phillips, Julia (1991). You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again. Random House. pp. 136 et seq. ISBN 0-394-57574-1. 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.In a deeply personal and candid foreword, Jong-Fast reflects on the inescapable hold the book had on her mother, the enduring legacy of protagonist Isadora Wing, and the novel’s ability to “capture the collective imagination, even for a moment.” Her account of her travails among these befuddled beauties, while not exactly a flag of truce in the war between the sexes, does hold out some hope of renewed negotiations. 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. Because the fact was that we’d reached that crucial time in a marriage (five years and the sheets you got as wedding presents have just about worn thin) when it’s time to decide whether to buy new sheets, have a baby perhaps, and live with each other’s lunacy ever after—or else give up the ghost of the marriage (throw out the sheets) and start playing musical beds all over again.

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—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.

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Fear of Flying – Erica Jong". Penguin Reading Guides. Penguin Books. Archived from the original on January 14, 2010 . Retrieved January 23, 2010. I was in my study writing. I was learning how to go down into myself and salvage bits and pieces of the past. I was learning how to sneak up on the unconscious and how to catch my seemingly random thoughts and fantasies. By closing me out of his world, Bennett had opened all sorts of worlds inside my own head. Gradually I began to realize that none of the subjects I wrote poems about engaged my deepest feelings, that there was a great chasm between what I cared about and what I wrote about. Why? What was I afraid of? Myself, most of all, it seemed.