Fear of Flying
By Erica Jong
Underneath it all, you longed to be annihilated by love...
Each one an antidote to the one that went before. Each one a reaction, an about-face, a rebound.
The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not "taking" and the woman is not "giving." No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one.
Pregnancy seemed like a tremendous abdication of control. Something growing inside you which would eventually usurp your life.
I'm just trying to lead my own fucking life if I can manage to find it in all this confusion.
Dancing is like fucking... it doesn't matter how you look - just concentrate on how you feel.
I want you. I want you. I want you. Anything to avoid saying: I love you.
The ultimate sexist put-down: the prick which lies down on the job.
Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments.
I'm very dependant. I fall apart regularly.
Sheer bitchiness can be a sort of style.
It's only when you're forbidden to talk about the future that you suddenly realize how much the future normally occupies the present.
Exceptional people are often called crazy by the ordinary world.
Everyone's a little crazy when you get inside their head... it's only a matter of deg
By Erica Jong
I have had the experience of having my sister get up at a meeting at Columbia University, where these scholars from all over the world were anointing Fear of Flying as a classic. And my sister got up and said, "Erica Jong has ruined my life — with her books.
By Erika Sánchez
(Which subjects do you wish more authors would write about?) Money. White authors often write about money (or don’t) in a way that disregards the realities of most people. It’s as if they assume that everyone simply has it. Or at least their readers. I remember reading “Fear of Flying,” by Erica Jong, many years ago, for instance, and getting very angry when the protagonist went to Europe for months with no concern for money or a job. I assumed she was relying on family money, but it was never explained. It took me out of the text because I couldn’t get over it. Maybe it’s because I grew up working class and money was a factor in everything we did. Marginalized people could never in their wildest dreams make these kinds of choices.
By Grace Paley
(Did you every read Fear of Flying?) G.P.: Well, that's another book that I really read part of several times and couldn't really finish. I thought it could have been done a lot faster and shorter…But again, that book was very important to a lot of women. I respect those facts, when people feel like that. I don't think it's just pure popularity; I don't think it's just that they were sold…But those books, those two books [The Women's Room and Fear of Flying], really were very important for lots of women.