It's obvious Fear of Dying is the decidedly wiser bookend to Jong's groundbreaking 1973 novel, less sexy and more thoughtful, and proving Jong's sustained relevancy. We were supposed to become grandmothers and retreat into serene sexlessness.") ("Women are not supposed to have passion at sixty.
Now, at the age of 73, she's released a fictional completion of the "trilogy," a book that confronts the still-clinging taboo of older women's sexuality. Jong was only 31 years old the year Fear of Flying was released, and she went on to publish more than 20 books over four decades – including the book's 1994 non-fiction companion, Fear of Fifty. Meditative and decidedly memoir-like, Fear of Flying went on to sell more than 20 million copies, becoming a free-love cultural touchstone shelved firmly in the canon of second-wave feminism, and lauded by the likes of John Updike and Henry Miller. And it is rarer than the unicorn."īoth the concept and the book hit a cultural nerve at the tail end of the sexual revolution, resonating with a generation of women who felt society had completely overlooked their desires, carnal and otherwise. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The man is not 'taking' and the woman is not 'giving.' No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. The adventurous Isadora Wing is on the hunt for what Jong famously called the "zipless fuck," described as "absolutely pure.
Her 1973 debut novel, Fear of Flying, was an explicit and revelatory look at the female sexuality of its era, depicting a 29-year-old erotic poet as she yearns to indulge unfulfilled fantasies with someone other than her husband. Erica Jong is perhaps best known for coining a phrase that can't be printed in a newspaper.
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