Guys… is life imitating art?
Fear of Flying is a 1973 novel by Erica Jong which became famously controversial for its portrayal of female sexuality and figured in the development of second-wave feminism.
The novel is written in the first person: narrated by its protagonist, Isadora Zelda White Stollerman Wing, a 29-year-old poet who has published two books of poetry. On a trip to Vienna with her second husband, Isadora decides to indulge her sexual fantasies with another man. Its tone may be considered conversational or informal. The story's American narrator is struggling to find her place in the world of academia, feminist scholarship, and in the literary world as a whole. The narrator is a female author of erotic poetry, which she publishes without fully realizing how much attention she will attract from both critics and writers of alarming fan letters.
The book resonated with women who felt stuck in unfulfilled marriages,[1] and it has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide.
Isadora Wing is a Jewish journalist from New York City’s Upper West Side. We meet her on a plane flight to Vienna for the first psychoanalyst’s conference since analysts were driven out during the Holocaust. She is surrounded by analysts, many of them her own from over the years, and her husband Bennett (also an analyst, naturally): "There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I'd been treated by at least six of them" (page 5).[2] Her fear of flying, both literally and metaphorically referring to a fear of freeing herself from the shackles of traditional male companionship, she associates with recent articles about plane hijackings and terrorist attacks. She also associates fear and loathing with Germany, her destination, because she and her husband were stationed in Heidelberg and she struggled both to fit in and to wrestle with the hatred and danger she felt being a Jew in post-Holocaust Germany.
Freudians perhaps inevitably have their own ideas about the symbolism of an airplane in the formation of the unconscious and the sexual psyche, and this contrast provides narrative suspense. What did the six psychiatrists make of the narrator's fears? Did she tell them? What will they say in Vienna if she mentions her nervous emotions? These questions are not really explicitly stated, but they may well occur to a reader's mind. The narrator, meanwhile, occupies her mind with many questions, plans, mental rough drafts and reminiscences as her journey unfolds, including the "zipless fuck," a major motif in the story that haunts the narrator throughout.
Upon arriving, Isadora meets English Langian analyst Adrian Goodlove. She is immediately hooked. Despite his gruff attitude and dirty sandals, he seems to provide what she desires but doesn’t find in her own marriage - energy, excitement, desire, danger. They begin a poorly-veiled secret affair, dancing and kissing rather openly at conference events, staying out nights, spending days by German pools. Adrian is wild and awakens things in Isadora she believed to be lost in the everydayness of her marriage, despite the fact that he is a rotten lay and often impotent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_Flying_(novel)