Her account of her travails among these befuddled beauties, while not exactly a flag of truce in the war between the sexes, does hold out some hope of renewed negotiations.

Erica Jong grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and attended Barnard College, where she majored in writing and literature, and she later received her M.A. in eighteenth-century English literature from Columbia University. She left halfway through the Ph.D. program to write her groundbreaking first novel, Fear of Flying, which went on to sell 20 million copies worldwide. She is also the author of many award-winning books of poetry, novels, and non-fiction including Sappho’s Leap, Fanny, Any Woman’s Blues, and Fear of Fifty. She lives in New York City and Connecticut. Her work has had a major impact on women’s lives all over the world. Even more to the point: the woman (unhappy though she knows her married friends to be) can never let he r sel f alone. She lives as if she were constantly on the brink of some great fulfillment. As if she were waiting for Prince Charming to take her away ‘from all this.’ All what? The solitude of living inside her own soul? The certainty of being herself instead of half of something else?Much later, I found out that Fear of Flying was a classic novel of second-wave feminism, which is to say it was derided by lots of first-wavers as trivial, solipsistic and too sex-oriented to be considered truly political. None of this concerned me. The writing was furiously good. It had a desperate edge to it, and the force of something that needed to be written. I still remember the final line of the first chapter, which I thought hit exactly the right note between pretentious, pleading, self-dramatising and self-knowing. It was the perfect layup for the novel that followed: “Consider this tapestry, my life.” In the thirty years since Fear of Flying was published, the line between autobiography (or memoir) and fiction has blurred. Fear of Flying was at the forefront of this trend. But it was never a literal autobiography though it had autobiographical elements. It’s not unusual for a first novel to have such elements. Early on, some critics (like John Updike) saw similarities between my novel and Catcher in the Rye. That’s another book that uses an autobiographical New York City setting but also takes the protagonist on a journey that is mythical.

I know some good marriages. Second marriages mostly. Marriages where both people have outgrown the bullshit of me-Tarzan, you-Jane and are just trying to get through their days by helping each other, being good to each other, doing the chores as they come up and not worrying too much about who does what. Some men reach that delightfully relaxed state of affairs about age forty or after a couple of divorces. Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you're going to die anyway.” Many attempts to adapt this property for Hollywood have been made, starting with Julia Phillips, who fantasized that it would be her debut as a director, from a screenplay by David Giler. The deal fell through and Erica Jong litigated, unsuccessfully. [8] In her second novel, [9] Jong created the character Britt Goldstein—easily identifiable as Julia Phillips—a predatory and self-absorbed Hollywood producer devoid of both talent and scruples. Erica Jong Marries Kenneth Burrows". The New York Times. August 6, 1989. Archived from the original on November 13, 2013. The rudeness wasn’t just in the sex, either; she is unbelievably rude about the Germans. I also loved the way she started sentences with “and”, as well as using slang and other things we’d been taught were capital crimes against good taste and grammar. This was my first encounter with a way of writing that was simultaneously posh and not posh. I find myself wondering how many other memories are hidden from me in the recesses of my own brain; indeed my own brain will seem to be the last great terra incognita, and I will be filled with wonder at the prospect of some day discovering new worlds there. Imagine the lost continent of Atlantis and all the submerged islands of childhood right there waiting to be found. The inner space we have never adequately explored. The worlds within worlds within worlds. And the marvelous thing is that they are waiting for us. If we fail to discover them, it is only because we haven't yet built the right vehicle - spaceship or submarine or poem - which will take us to them.

READERS GUIDE

The decision was, of course, further complicated by analysis—the basic assumption of analysis being (and never mind all the evidence to the contrary) that you’re getting better all the time. The refrain goes something like this: Parachutes & Kisses. New York: New American Library (1984) (UK ed. as Parachutes and Kisses: London: Granada, 1984.) [12] You said somewhere that when you were writing Fear of Flying, you thought of killing off Isadora but were determined that she not die for her sins. Why?