Fear of Flying is a 1973 novel by Erica Jong. It became 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.
The novel's 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 an 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 unfulfilling marriages, "What [Isadora is] looking for is how to be a whole human being, a body and a mind, and that is what women were newly aware they needed in 1973." However, she also points out the drawbacks of a sexually liberated life and acknowledges that sexuality "is not the cure for every restlessness." Male critics who interpreted Isadora as being "promiscuous" were actually misinterpreting her acts since she has an active fantasy life but does not really sleep with many men. This does, however, allude to the possibility that other charming men can bring a woman's fantasies to life, hence "promiscuity" is there, just not realized.
Jong says that today, women are no longer shocked by Isadora's sexuality and the depiction of sex and fantasy, but readers were when the book was first released. Instead, she sees the book as a reflection of the lack of pleasure that many young women experience in sexual interactions. She cites the TV show Girls as an example of media depicting sexually liberated women but without attention to female pleasure. Just like Isadora, the women on television and alive today struggle to reconcile the empowerment of sexual freedom with the disempowerment of sex without pleasure. However, she also sees growth in the female population that live alone and "whose lives are full with friends, travel, work, everything and who don’t feel that in some way they're inferior because they don’t have a man at their side" as being one extremely positive result of the way sexual liberation has transformed over the decades. In her second novel, Jong created the character Britt Goldstein, a predatory and self-absorbed Hollywood producer devoid of both talent and scruples.
In May 2013 it was announced that a screenplay version by Piers Ashworth had been green-lit by Blue-Sky Media, with Laurie Collyer directing.