John Updike loved it-“She sprinkles on the four-letter words as if women had invented them her cheerful sexual frankness brings a new flavor to female prose,” he wrote, placing Fear of Flying in the camp of Portnoy’s Complaint and Catcher in the Rye, “the smart kid’s lament.” So did Henry Miller, who declared it worthy of his own Tropic of Cancer, though “not as bitter and much funnier” he and Jong became pen pals. “Even if you loved your husband,” Jong’s protagonist says, “there came that inevitable year when fucking him turned as bland as Velveeta cheese. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Philip Roth, articulating a literary sex fantasy from a woman’s point of view in language as lurid and forthright and smutty as anything they’d written. From the first pages, Jong boldly strode into territory previously occupied by D. Now that Fear of Flying is marking its fortieth anniversary, repackaged in a couple new editions featuring the original hippified collage art or in a graphic version depicting spread legs straddling front and back covers, it strikes me as an epitaph worth reconsidering.įorty years ago, there was nothing “dandelion fluff” about it. Zipless because it seemed to happen out of nowhere-“zippers fell away like rose petals, underwear blew off in one breath like dandelion fluff”-and end just as freely, without the pressures or expectations of a relationship. She’d put the unprintable on the page and it became her catchphrase. And it is rarer than the unicorn.” Later, after Fear of Flying, her feminist novel that coined the term for anonymous, no-strings-attached sex, shot to the top of best-seller lists (it’s since sold more than 20 million copies), Jong worried that those words would be all that remained on her tombstone. “The zipless fuck,” wrote Erica Jong in 1973, “is the purest thing there is.

Erica jong's fear of flying