Fear of Flying, by Erica Jong

I finished my first quarter on Tuesday. I handed in my final for my class on theory, and reached the mid-term mark in my research seminar. Next Monday I’ll start a new class on Growth and Inequality, predominately comparing China with the West. But for now, for the next four days, I’m enjoying a break. Yesterday I went to the center of town, had  a glass of wine, people watched, and read a book. Today I’m hoping to meet a German friend and climb to the top of this. After that I’ll head to a museum. I’d like to end the day of tourism with more of my book.

An old friend suggested I read Fear of Flying.  You can read her note in the comments of my Know Me section.  I can’t explain why I loved her compliment so. Or why I even took it as a compliment. You’ll just have to read it.  I think she may know me better than I realized.  It’s taken me over a year to finally delve into the book.

I feel so strongly about this work I’m encouraging every liberal woman I cling to to read it.

The book is written from the perspective of an educated woman in her twenties trying to figure her life out. She’s married, unhappily, she’s having an affair, unhappily. But it’s not about that. It’s about her. It about figuring out what the hell she wants for her life.  She wants to be a writer, but it terrifies her.  She wants to be independent, but it terrifies her.  She’s confused about why she should want to be all these other things (she doesn’t want) solely because that is what society tells her she should want to be.

I haven’t finished the book, so I am not claiming to know everything. But I’m enjoying it like I haven’t enjoyed a book in a long while. Here are some excerpts I’ve underlined while reading. Please don’t think that I think these quotes pertain to all women, or that just because a woman doesn’t lead the life I want that I see her as simple. I have no issue with women who are housewives, secretaries, or any other profession they choose. The point is, this is about me. This is about me deciding what it is I want for myself.

“I thought of all the cautious good-girl rules I had lived by- the good student, the dutiful daughter, the guilty faithful wife who committed adultery only in her head-and I decided that for once I was going to be brave and follow my feelings no matter what the consequences. I thought of Dr. Happe saying: “You’re not a secretary, you’re a poet-why do you expect your life to be uncomplicated?” I thought of D. H. Lawrence  running off with his tutor’s wife, of Romeo and Juliet dying for love, of Aschenbach pursuing Tadzio through plaguey Venice, of all the real and imaginary people who had picked up and burned their bridges and taken off into the wild blue yonder. I was one of them! No scared housewife, I. I was flying.”

“It took me years to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time, to put up with the solitude and the terror of failure, and the godawful silence of the white paper.”

“I had published a book which even I could still stand to read.”

“I had gone to graduate school because I loved literature, but in graduate school you were not supposed to study literature. You were supposed to study criticism. Some professor wrote a book ‘proving’ that TOM JONES was really a Marxist parable. Some other professor wrote a book ‘proving’ that TOM JONES was really a Christian parable. Some other professor wrote a book ‘proving’ that TOM JONES was really a parable of the Industrial Revolution. . . . Nobody seemed to give a shit about your reading TOM JONES as long as you could reel off the names of the various theories and who invented them. . . . My response was to sleep through as much of it as possible.”

The author talking about this character she created 30 years ago:

“What a manic she was. Raging hormones ruled her life… I want to say to her: ‘Slow down, be calm, meditate, do yoga, everything will turn out all right.’ But she can’t hear me. There is no time machine to take me back to her and revise the contents of her teeming brain. And if there were, this book would not exist.”

“The twenties are as frenetic a decade as the teens. You have a voice inside your head repeating I want, I want, I want, but you don’t know what you want or how to get it. You hardly know who you are. You go on instinct. And your instinct mostly pushes you toward adventures you won’t grasp until you look back on them. Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.”

“She desperately wants to be a writer, but she can’t sit still.”