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. 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.

Fear of flying erica jong review