The Jewish science,’ as anti-Semites call it. Turn every question upside down and shove it up the asker’s ass. Analysts all seem to be Talmudists who flunked out of seminary in the first year. I was reminded of one of my grandfather’s favorite gags: Eda Mirsky Mann, painter, mother of novelist Erica Jong - The Boston Globe". The Boston Globe. The Associated Press . Retrieved May 22, 2022. Erica Jong was honored with the United Nations Award for Excellence in Literature. She has also received Poetry magazine's Bess Hokin Prize, also won by W.S. Merwin and Sylvia Plath. In France, she received the Deauville Award for Literary Excellence and in Italy, she received the Sigmund Freud Award for Literature. The City University of New York awarded Ms. Jong an honorary PhD at the College of Staten Island.

Brodesser-Akner alos heralds the novel’s remarkable cultural impact in her introduction, writing: “At its most basic, Fear of Flying is a trailblazing, historic account of what it meant to grapple with the complexities and contradictions of what women were told they should want and what they actually do… She made this grappling accessible to a mass audience of women who, for the first time, understood that they weren’t alone.”Yet if the novel is a cop-out from a feminist perspective, if Isadora’s consciousness hasn’t risen much by the end, why have millions of women found her story inspiring and liberating? Why do graduate students in Belgrade, housewives in Hong Kong, and female business entrepreneurs in Tokyo identify with this upper-middle-class Jewish New Yorker with a kvetching habit? Why do they still love her today? Because the fact was that we’d reached that crucial time in a marriage (five years and the sheets you got as wedding presents have just about worn thin) when it’s time to decide whether to buy new sheets, have a baby perhaps, and live with each other’s lunacy ever after—or else give up the ghost of the marriage (throw out the sheets) and start playing musical beds all over again. Erica Jong Helps Barnard's Budding Writers". Columbia University Record. October 11, 1996 . Retrieved May 22, 2022.

One of the most quoted lines from this novel is “Men and women —women and men —it will never work.” The tone is clearly ironic. Why do you think this line speaks to people? Isadora often blurs the distinction between fantasy and reality. Is this seen as a virtue, a vice, or both? Isadora seems to feel most free when she’s experiencing sexual pleasure and when she’s writing. What’s the connection between these two aspects of her world? This fivesome bounces along for a while, the widow and the fat woman keeping silent, the mother and grandmother talking to the child and each other about the food. And then the train screeches to a halt in a town called (perhaps) corleone. A tall languid-looking soldier, unshaven, but with a beautiful mop of hair, a cleft chin, and somewhat devilish, lazy eyes, enters the compartment, looks insolently around, sees the empty half-seat between the fat woman and the widow, and, with many flirtatious apologies, sits down. He is sweaty and disheveled but basically a gorgeous hunk of flesh, only slightly rancid from the heat. The train screeches out of the station.a b c "Erica Jong papers, 1955–2018 bulk 1965–2004". Columbia University Libraries Archival Collections. Columbia University . Retrieved May 22, 2022.

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 a female 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. I find myself wondering how many other memories are hidden from me in the recesses of my own brain; indeed my own brain will seem to be the last great terra incognita, and I will be filled with wonder at the prospect of some day discovering new worlds there. Imagine the lost continent of Atlantis and all the submerged islands of childhood right there waiting to be found. The inner space we have never adequately explored. The worlds within worlds within worlds. And the marvelous thing is that they are waiting for us. If we fail to discover them, it is only because we haven't yet built the right vehicle - spaceship or submarine or poem - which will take us to them. Implying that h e might just find someone sweeter, prettier, smarter, a better cook, and maybe even due to inherit piles of bread from her father.) 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 and the white paper. And now that I can take it . . . now that I can finally do it . . . I'm really raring to go. Jong, Erica (May 18, 2008). "Hurrah for Gay Marriage". The Huffington Post . Retrieved October 18, 2013.Since then, many of the early feminist novels have acquired “classic of the genre” status, but none has become an international cultural phenomenon on the scale of Fear of Flying. By 1977, Jong’s book had been translated into twelve languages and had sold six million copies. The collapse of communism created another surge in celebrity and sales as the novel became available in former Soviet Republics and East European countries. Fear of Flying has now sold more than eighteen million copies and is available in thirty languages. In 2008, Jong told an interviewer that wherever she travels—Belgrade, Hong Kong, Tokyo—people still want her to know how completely they identify with the novel’s protagonist. “I am Isadora Wing,” they say. I have no doubt this is true.