The best part of these adventures seemed to be the way we went into hysterics describing them to each other. Joining girlfriend Pia in Europe, the women sleep around indiscriminately, wondering why they remain miserable. Unfortunately, his brilliance edges into psychosis, and the marriage is annulled. Stollerman seems to be her soul mate: a brilliant young man, he can outrun her intellect. At Barnard, she meets her first husband Brian Stollerman. The child of artistic parents who made a killing selling tchtochkes (Yiddish for “worthless ornaments”, “decorative junk” or just “junk”), she attends the High School of Performing Arts, then Barnard College. Isadora White grew up a postwar child of privilege on New York’s Upper West Side. As they careen through Germany, Italy, then back through France, with minimal urging from Adrian, Isadora obligingly spills her life story. The pair bounce across Europe in his two-seater, drinking too much, arguing, failing to have intercourse, camping at grubby campsites. Besotted enough to take off with Goodlove. Isadora, admitting her taste in men dubious, is besotted. As for the zipless fuck, he’s a bust: impotence rules the day. Alternately sneering and adoring, often in the same breath, he insults Isadora’s bourgeois tendencies while concealing his own. He is divorced, with a girlfriend and two young children back home. Isadora realizes Goodlove is a slimy sort, but this doesn’t stop her from falling madly in lust with him. Upon their arrival in Vienna, Isadora and Bennett meet English psychoanalyst Adrian Goodlove (Jong adores all forms of wordplay, including puns). Nor do the women’s appearances: both Jong and Wing are petite, blue-eyed blondes. The men, and later, the daughter, barely change from life to fiction. In the novels, Erica Mann Jong becomes Isadora White Wing.
#ERICA JONG HOW TO#
Jong’s depiction of this motley crew is hilariously funny throughout Fear of Flying she takes every opportunity to poke fun at the cast, endearing Isadora to the reader.Īlthough Jong denies it, Fear of Flying, and its narrator’s subsequent adventures in How to Save Your Own Life (1977) and Parachutes and Kisses (1984) reads as veiled autobiography. It is the early ’70s, and Freud still holds sway over the psychiatric establishment. On their flight are 117 fellow psychoanalysts, many of whom have treated Isadora.
Along with her psychiatrist spouse, Isadora is en route to a psychoanalytical congress in Vienna. She doesn’t quite find the zipless fuck, but she does come closer to finding herself.Īs Fear of Flying opens, Isadora is far from reconciling her desires. Oh, how Isadora wants: unfettered sex, passion, adoration, unbounded love, emotional connection, intellectual communion.īouncing between her emotionally rigid husband, Bennett, and the alluringly unavailable Adrian Goodlove, Isadora temporarily bolts, leaving her staid marriage for a truncated European odyssey. In the novel, Jong’s alter ego, Isadora Wing, grapples with conflicting desires for marital stability and the zipless fuck’s sexual freedom. It was a platonic ideal… For the true, ultimate zipless A-1 fuck, it was necessary that you never got to know the man very well.”įorty years after publication, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying remains timely in its concerns. In her books, Erica Jong tries to give women an authoritative voice by depicting strong heroines who are not afraid to express their sensuality and talk about the issues concerning the contemporary women.“The Zipless Fuck was more than a fuck.
Sex and female sexuality are the core themes in most of Erica Jong’s writings on which she has given talks, has been interviewed and praised by writers like John Updike and Henry Miller. The novel shocked the public for its explicit treatment of women's sexuality and significantly marked the development of the Second Wave Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1960’s as well as the Sexual Revolution. The book, in which she coined a world-known term “zipless fuck” to describe an ideal sexual rendezvous, was translated into 40 languages making the young writer a heroine to millions of female readers worldwide. Erica Jong (born March 26, 1942, New York), a contemporary American fiction and poetry writer and teacher, is best known for her polemic novel Fear of Flying (1973).
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