She’s got the “restlessness, the hunger, the thump in the gut, the thump in the cunt, the longing to be filled up, to be fucked through every hole, the yearning for dry champagne and wet kisses”. To stay or go? To settle down together or to strike out alone? Isadora spends most of the novel weighing up her options and testing her self-conceived boundaries. More than its engaging, pulpy premise or its witty, concise sexual vocabulary (penises are “warhead pricks"), the best parts of the novel are where Jong uses Isadora’s existential crisis to explore a more human malaise. At the conference, Isadora falls for a bawdy London therapist called Adrian Goodlove (seriously) who convinces her into a two-and-a-half week drunken road trip across Europe, promising she’ll find herself in the process. Its heroine, Isadora Wing, is a Jewish American woman who accompanies her uptight analyst husband, Bennett, to a shrink convention in Vienna. Things have clearly changed in the intervening decades – but re-reading Fear of Flying, it’s remarkable how so much has stayed the same. 40 years on, Jong’s debut is now a cultural touchstone of the sexual revolution. “A whiny, feminist novel.” That was the New York Times in 1973, reviewing Fear of Flying by Erica Jong.
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