Instead, they remember the provocative expression Ms. John Updike called the book “fearless” and compared it to “The Catcher in the Rye” and “Portnoy’s Complaint” Henry Miller predicted it would “make literary history” for its “wisdom about the eternal man-woman problem” and the novel was hailed by many (not all) in feminism’s second wave as a pathbreaking achievement for female self-expression.īut what most people who have read or heard about “Fear of Flying” remember is not that it’s a rare example of a bildungsroman in which a woman, not a man, struggles to define what she wants her life to look like, and to compel that image into being.

Isadora’s frank, explicit, chatty account of her quest for no-strings, satisfying sex (“absolutely pure” and “free of ulterior motives”) electrified and titillated the critical establishment. In 1973, Erica Jong exploded onto the literary scene with “Fear of Flying,” her chronicle of the soul-searching, sensuality-seeking adventures of an intellectual young poet named Isadora Wing during a business trip with her second husband to a psychoanalysts’ conference in Vienna.

Fear of Flying by Erica Jong