She soon finds the ironically named Adrian Goodlove, who, though often impotent, manages to tempt her away from her sullen and taciturn husband. Apropos of this trip, and in good therapeutic fashion, Isadora spins out tales of her troubled childhood and early adulthood, her years in Heidelberg and in graduate school at Columbia, and all the woes of being a woman in a patriarchal world (“Growing up female in America. As the novel begins, she is accompanying her second husband, a Chinese-American psychotherapist named Bennett Wing, to an international psychiatry conference in Vienna–the city, Isadora points out, that Freud fled in 1938. Jong’s highly autobiographical protagonist and narrator, Isadora White Stollerman Wing, grows up in a well-off but loopy New York Jewish family. A few years later, Philip Roth showed that dirty words and sexual frankness could be put to use in fiction both uproariously funny and, in its own way, deeply serious.Ī talented 20-something poet and literary scholar named Erica Jong saw all of this going on, and said, in effect, why are the boys having all the fun? In 1973, she published Fear of Flying, an exuberant novel dripping with sex and satire that has gone on to sell over 12 million copies in–believe it or not–27 languages. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and a moldy old pornographic romp by the name of Fanny Hill. publishers to sell, without expurgation or bowdlerization, “dirty” books such as D. In the 1960s, thanks to a series of court battles-often tried by Jewish lawyers–it became possible for reputable U.S. Reprinted with permission from American Jewish Fiction: A JPS Guide ( Jewish Publication Society).

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Fear of flying novel