Fear of Flying Is Fifty

It’s hard to believe now what an uproar Erica Jong’s unclassifiable book caused when it was first published fifty years ago, hard to credit that in this country we were still in the grip of a puritanism that meant a topic like women’s orgasms and why they weren’t happening could only be discussed in whispers. Jong’s courage in going to bat for all of us who couldn’t speak up for ourselves is a quality I will always admire.

D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover had already caused a commotion and been banned in this country for years, but it did not focus on Lady Chatterley’s experience. Henry Miller’s two Topic memoirs had also been prohibited for a while with their great displays of male sexual machismo. Anaïs Nin’s extraordinary books were still in the future. Lois Gould’s Such Good Friends, Anne Roiphe’s Up The Sandbox and Alix Kate Shuman’s Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen ploughed some of Jong’s territory but her fierce championing of women’s right to sexual satisfaction still feels raw, frightening—and uplifting.

The early seventies were a terrible time. For unmarried women, obtaining contraception could be a struggle. At my women’s college, we couldn’t obtain a diaphragm, the best form of contraception available, at the health center unless we went to the dime store first and bought a fake gold wedding ring, inventing a story to match.

Years later in 1972 when Fear of Flying came out, I was at the start of a painful and contentious divorce. My soon-to-be ex and I left for a weekend at a country hotel in a vain attempt to patch things up. Each of us had Fear of Flying on our nightstands. It gave me courage.

Jong had to face the snotty reaction of the mainstream male literary critics. Martin Amis proclaimed that he neither knew nor cared whether “all the horrible and embarrassing things in the book” actually happened to the author. He might have realized that was not the point. Paul Theroux called Isadora, the narrator, “witless,” nothing but a “mammoth pudenda.” Female critics weren’t much better.

The great standout, writing the review that sealed the book’s enormous success, was John Updike. His broad and deep understanding of the characters he created and of Jong’s proves, to me, his indisputable greatness, illustrated by his brilliant short stories and novels; his series of Rabbit novels, following the sexual adventures of a man nicknamed Rabbit, had caused him a little trouble, but nothing like the spitefulness Jong endured. As for fan letters, there were so many of them, “filthy, fond and heartbreaking,” Jong wrote that if she answered all of them, “I would never write another book.”

She had found her audience, an audience that needs her nearly as much today as we did in 1972.

The New York Times‘ reviewer, publishing on the anniversary, asserted that the book “caused a sensation—but not a revolution.” That remains to be seen. She adds, “Today every women is an Isadora. Or maybe none is. Americans are lonely—marrying less, partnering less. Even having less intercourse than ever.”

She might have gone on to consider the reasons. The loneliness of modern women in this country is rooted in our failure to learn from Isadora.

And from Erica Jong.

In Writing Erica Jong