It was necessary to have one best friend in a hostile world, one person you’d be loyal to no matter what, one person who’d always be loyal to you.
Take, for example, what the heroine-Isadora Wing-has to say about marriage (all quotations from the New American Library edition, 2003): Fear of Flying was reviewed by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times (November 6, 1973) together with Jane Howard’s A Different Woman and by Michael Wood in the New York Review of Books (March 21, 1974) with Barbara Raskin’s Loose Ends and Grace Paley’s Enormous Changes at the Last Minute.īut Fear of Flying stood out it caused a singular commotion at the time-for some, as a historic breakthrough in what women could write about and, perhaps more important, how they could say it for others, as a particularly repugnant example of collapsing moral standards in America. Jong’s book joined a roster of best-sellers that included Sue Kaufman’s Diary of a Mad Housewife (1967), Anne Roiphe’s Up the Sandbox (1970), Lois Gould’s Such Good Friends (1970) and Necessary Objects (1972), Alix Kates Shulman’s Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (1972), and Marge Piercy’s Small Changes (1973). Of course, Fear of Flying was part of a successful publishing trend: “the feminist novel”-popular realistic fiction by women about contemporary women’s lives. in Atlanta, Georgia (see Time, February 3, 1975, and Newsweek, May 5, 1975). By mid-1975, three book clubs had snapped up the novel professors at Rice University, Radcliffe, UCLA, and the University of Wisconsin were teaching it in literature and sociology courses and women were discussing it in consciousness-raising groups around the country, including at the Y.W.C.A. The fact that Henry Miller called Fear of Flying “the feminine counterpart to my own Tropic of Cancer” and predicted that “this book will make literary history” ( New York Times, September 7, 1974) didn’t account for the paperback’s success- Fear of Flying’s reputation had already been growing by word-of-mouth-but it certainly didn’t hurt. The paperback (November 1974) sold three million copies within months and was number one on the charts.
The hardback edition (November 1973) reached the lower rungs of the best-seller list with reviews that ranged from rave to scathing. Love it or hate it, the book made history. House of Representatives accepted its first female page, and AT&T settled a major lawsuit by agreeing to end pay discrimination against women-Holt, Rinehart and Winston published Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, the mock memoir of a young woman’s quest for autonomy, adventure, and mind-altering sex. In 1973-the same year that the Supreme Court decided Roe v. (Ms.)reading Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying Joanne Barkan ▪ Fall 2009
0 kommentar(er)
