Erica Jong Fear Of Flying

Getting Your Head Around Fear of Flying

I first read Erica Jong Fear Of Flying back in 2004, on a flight from Chicago to New York where the turbulence was bad enough that I actually put the book down for twenty minutes. I picked it back up and finished it. That's the thing about this novel - it demands that kind of attention, or at least it rewards it if you're in the right headspace. The book centers on Isabella Bardi, a thirty-four-year-old woman married to a psychiatrist named Peter who spent years trying to psychoanalyze her into someone more interesting. She goes to Rome alone on a writing fellowship while he stays in Paris with his student mistress, and the novel follows what happens when she's left to figure out who she actually is without someone telling her who she should be. The opening lines hit pretty hard: "There once was a woman who believed herself free." Then Jong explains what that means in plain language, and you realize she's been setting up a premise that the rest of the book either proves or completely dismantles.

Erica Jong Fear Of Flying - What It Actually Is

Most people know this book for one phrase: "zipperless love." Jong coined it to describe sex without barriers, emotional and physical. The novel became a cultural touchstone in the seventies, sold over ten million copies, and spawned a terrible movie adaptation that almost everyone involved seems embarrassed by. The book itself is different from the film. It's smarter and funnier than the trailers ever suggested, and it doesn't shy away from the messy parts of female desire that were still being whispered about when it came out. Isabella isn't a clean protagonist. She sleeps with a man she meets at a dinner party early on, then later pursues other men with a mix of curiosity and desperation that feels honest rather than sanitized. Jong writes about sexuality the way a lot of writers write about business deals - with a level of practical detail that some readers found shocking in 1973 and still find jarring today. The prose isn't literary in the dense sense. It's direct, often funny, and occasionally clumsy in a way that actually works in its favor because it mirrors how people think when they're trying to figure something out.

Why People Still Talk About This Book

The core tension in the novel is about freedom versus connection, and Jong never resolves it cleanly. Isabella wants independence but keeps choosing relationships. She wants to be unattached but finds herself craving intimacy. Peter, her husband, is portrayed as someone who intellectualizes emotions to the point where he can't actually feel them, which is both a satire and a genuinely sad character study. Their marriage isn't presented as something that should be fixed or celebrated - it's just examined, sometimes critically, sometimes with a kind of tired affection. One thing beginners often miss when approaching this novel is that Jong was writing against a specific literary tradition. The female coming-of-age story before the seventies typically involved a woman either being corrupted or being redeemed. Isabella does neither. She changes, sure, but not in a way that fits neatly into either category. Reading it with that context in mind shifts how you interpret a lot of the quieter scenes, particularly the ones where Isabella is alone in Rome and just exists without much happening externally. I remember struggling with a student who kept asking me to identify whether Isabella was meant to be admired or criticized. The question itself reveals a habit of reading I tried to break - the assumption that a central female character needs to be morally legible. Jong wasn't interested in that framework. Neither should you be, necessarily.

The Structure and How It Works

The novel moves between Isabella's present experiences in Rome and her memories, with occasional shifts into fantasy sequences that blur the line between what she's actually doing and what she's imagining. Jong uses a third-person limited narrator who stays close to Isabella's consciousness, which means you get her interpretations of events but also her blind spots. This is where the book gets genuinely interesting technically. The unreliable narration isn't heavy-handed - Isabella isn't lying to you, she's just incomplete in her self-awareness, which is far more realistic and harder to pin down. The pacing is deliberate. There's a famous scene in the middle where Isabella spends several pages thinking about nothing in particular, and readers either love that passage or skip past it. I've found that skipping it usually means you're missing the point of what Jong is doing with the novel's treatment of female interiority. Women's thoughts aren't always plotted toward action, and the book insists on that visually through its structure. When I worked with advanced seminars on twentieth-century American fiction, I'd have students annotate the fantasy sequences separately from the realist passages. The boundary between them is deliberately porous, but tracking where each mode begins and ends gives you a sense of how Jong maps Isabella's psychological landscape. It's a technique that would become more common in literary fiction over the next few decades, and Fear of Flying is earlier than most people give it credit for in that regard.

What Doesn't Work

The book has real limitations. The male characters, particularly the men Isabella encounters in Rome, exist mostly as functions of her story rather than fully realized people. Some of the satire around Italian culture and academia feels dated even now, with a kind of well-meaning superficiality that suggests Jong didn't spend enough time in the actual environments she's describing. The ending has caused arguments for decades because it's deliberately unsatisfying - Isabella returns to her marriage, and Jong presents this not as a defeat or a triumph but as a complicated choice that doesn't resolve into either category. If you're looking for a novel that provides closure, this isn't it. The book operates more like an ongoing conversation with itself than a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Some readers interpret the conclusion as Isabella settling, others as her choosing a pragmatic path that doesn't diminish her growth, and honestly both readings hold water because Jong built that ambiguity into the architecture of the thing. I've recommended an alternative for people who want a clearer arc - Anita Desai's Fire on the Mountain tackles similar themes of female isolation with more narrative propulsion, though it's a heavier read and lacks the humor that makes Jong's novel accessible in the first place.

Practical Reading Notes

Expect to read this in two or three sittings. It's not short, roughly four hundred pages depending on edition, but it's also not dense enough to slow you down significantly. The dialogue moves fast, the internal monologue is more expansive, and Jong occasionally slips into longer descriptive passages that do require a bit more attention. I usually suggest reading it with a pen handy, not because the symbolism is encoded but because the recurring images - the zipless fantasy itself, the flying motif, the various cages and containers Isabella describes - are worth noting as they appear rather than discovering them all at once at the end. The 1973 first edition and most subsequent paperback editions are fine. There's a notable essay Jong wrote later about the book's reception and the backlash it faced, which adds useful context if you want to understand why this particular novel became such a lightning rod. The cultural moment matters more than the text alone in this case, which is unusual for fiction and worth keeping in mind if you're approaching the book as a historical document as much as a narrative.