The prose takes off

It is the fiftieth anniversary of Fear of Flying, and my treasured copy of the galleys, with Erica Jong’s scrawled signature on the red cover, has just begun to disintegrate. It had arrived on September 5, 1973, with a letter from her publisher – “we are making a strong commitment to the book because everyone around here feels an enormous amount of enthusiasm for it”. Published in December 1973, Fear of Flying would go on to sell 35 million copies and be translated into more than 45 languages, and Jong became the object of attention, admiration and denunciation.

A new paperback edition for the fiftieth anniversary has been published with an introduction by the novelist Taffy Brodesser-Akner and an emotional foreword by Jong’s daughter, the media star Molly Jong-Fast. It is a bombshell, and this anniversary, unlike previous ones, will be the occasion for a major re-evaluation. Jong-Fast writes that the book was a “cultural flashpoint” for women and brought her mother riches and fame. “It created Erica Jong”, the sex symbol and celebrity. But it was also a burden and a curse. “There is incredible power in being able to capture the collective imagination … and Mom did that. But she was never able to do it again. Her seeking, her quest to get that moment back, was terribly painful and ultimately devoured her.” Brodesser-Akner’s introduction acknowledges that while Jong wrote three more novels about her most successful protagonist, they lacked the urgency and thrill of Fear of Flying. The novel was “a trailblazing, historic” novel of women’s desires that made the stories of her feminist generation “new and legitimate”. Moreover, Brodesser-Akner points out, it combined boisterous sexuality with literary erudition; it “expects you are as smart and educated and horny as it is – as she is”.

For meFear of Flying stands up as an audacious and ambitious first novel with a wide range of reference: epigraphs from Byron, Shakespeare, Colette and Cole Porter; discussions of women writers, and her own wish to be a female Chaucer. It has a terrific opening paragraph: “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 … I was now, if anything, more scared of flying than when I began my analytic adventures”. Isadora Wing is the narrator, and her husband, Bennett, is on the plane, therapeutically holding her hand during take-off. They are all heading to Vienna for the 1971 Psychoanalytic Congress honouring Freud, who had left the city in 1938 amid rising antisemitism. Isadora has been hired by a magazine called Voyeur to write a satirical article about the congress. And initially the novel seems to be a satire on psychoanalysis.

But then it quickly announces its theme: being female in America, where “you grew up with your ears full of cosmetic ads, love songs, whoreoscopes … and moral dilemmas on the level of TV soap operas”. Even if you’re very smart it doesn’t matter, because you are conditioned to choose marriage and motherhood, and to suppress “the longings which marriage stifled … to hit the open road from time to time, to discover whether you could still live alone inside your own head … to discover, in short, whether you were still whole after so many years of being half of something”.

In Vienna Isadora begins her own journey of independence. Her memories of living in Germany when Bennett had done his medical military service, and she had written a column for a Heidelberg newsletter and researched Nazi history, are among the strongest chapters of the book. There she had faced some of her conflicts about writing honestly about herself – her “violent feelings about Germany, the unhappiness in my marriage”, her sexual fantasies and the memories of her first marriage, to the brilliant but psychotic and suicidal Brian.

Isadora wants stability, and Bennett, her second husband, is steady but silent and inscrutable; after five years she has begun to feel “like I was fucking Helen Keller”. Bored and childless, seeing a German psychoanalyst and anxious about not realizing her literary dreams and ambitions, she is cynical about marriage in general: “Even if you loved your husband, there came that inevitable year” when your sex life is like Velveeta cheese “and you long for an overripe Camembert”. She has fantasies of sexual adventure, which she calls the “Zipless Fuck”, effortless sex that is brief, anonymous, frequent and European.

Breaking away from Bennett, she sets off boldly to travel with an irreverent English Laingian psychoanalyst, Adrian Goodlove. It’s partly a memory trip, in which Isadora refects on her wealthy and open-minded Jewish family, her two unhappy marriages and her unfulfilled literary ambitions. One of her sisters is married to a Black orthopedic surgeon and has quintuplets; another is married to an Arab. (Jong’s actual sister came to a conference on Fear of Flying in New York in 2008 to publically complain that the book was full of anti-Arab prejudice and had always caused her pain.) On the road with Adrian, Isadora believes, she has abandoned the script and risked chaos and chance with her wild lover. But Adrian finally confesses that his own plan is to meet up with his wife and kids in Paris for their summer vacation. On the outskirts of the city she reads an important sign in caps: “FEMMES! LIBERONS-NOUS!”

And at last, having made it to London by herself, Isadora realizes she has to take responsibility for her own life. She knows that she can survive, and that she will keep writing. But how will her story be resolved? Jong foregrounds the question by calling the last chapter “A 19th-Century Ending”. Will Isadora go back to her husband, get killed in a car accident, have a baby? Or choose a twentieth-century ending, divorce her husband and start again as a single woman? In that final chapter Isadora is still afraid of flying, but she doesn’t “let that fear control me”. She gets her period: she isn’t pregnant, but she is facing a new beginning. She returns to Bennett, but with a new acceptance of her body and her literary future: “A nice body. Mine. I decided to keep it.”

Fear of Flying inspired and gave permission to many women novelists. The popular novelist Jennifer Weiner once told the New York Times that Jong made her “believe I could tell stories in my voice and not have to assume someone else’s”. Even when she was an established writer she would still read Jong “almost like a road map”. Jong herself credited Doris Lessing, among women novelists, with the breaking of taboos. But the obvious precursor of Fear of Flying was Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1971), which featured a neurotic novelist talking to his therapist. Roth never responded to Jong’s book, but John Updike wrote an enthusiastic review in the New Yorker. Careful to refer to the author as “Mrs. Jong”, Updike praised the content and style: “the prose flies”. Jong was delighted by his review, in part because she was in love with the prestigious New Yorker and its elite literary world, “located somewhere east of Westport and west of the Cotswolds”, as Wing fondly describes it.

Jong felt that his review had given her literary credibility and helped to make the book a bestseller. For decades after, Jong-Fast attests, women would come up to her mother on the street, in stores and in restaurants, “look earnestly into her eyes, and tell her how the book had changed their lives”. Indeed, it changed her daughter’s life too; it’s the reason she is a writer herself. But it’s a troubling, if lucrative, legacy. In 2025 Picador will publish Jong-Fast’s “magnificently vivid” and “fiercely honest” memoir, Losing Erica Jong.

Other than for fiercely honest and ambitious literary daughters, is Fear of Flying relevant for a new generation? Psychoanalysis has gone out of fashion or been replaced by medication, while ideas about gender and sexuality have become more complicated. Isadora today could be thinking about bisexuality and lesbianism, identities Jong would explore in subsequent novels. And overall the twenty-first century has been troubling for American women. Fear of Flying was set at a moment when American feminism seemed to be winning. It was published in the year the Supreme Court passed Roe vs Wade, legalizing abortion. In June 2022 the Republican Supreme Court justices were able to overturn Roe vs Wade. The Equal Rights Amendment has never been passed. Many countries have now had female prime ministers, but no American woman has yet been elected president.

And the author? At eighty-one, Erica Jong has memory problems and dementia. Molly Jong-Fast writes that “she sits in a room waiting for me to visit her, but she’s not there anymore … she’s like some beautiful little doll”. That could be a sardonic twenty-first-century ending of the feminist dream, the epitaph of an era. But even if the author is disappearing, the novel is still there, still funny, exuberant, ambitious and intelligent. It still speaks to us. I’m glad to have a copy of the galleys. I’ll hold on to them.

Elaine Showalter is Professor Emerita of English at Princeton University

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