When you finally do sit down to write about me, you won’t know whether I’m a hero or an antihero, a bastard or a saint.

'I refuse to be impaled on a pin,' Adrian said, unaware of the pun it immediately brought to mind. Adrian is wild and awakens things in Isadora she believed to be lost in the everydayness of her marriage although he is a rotten lay and often impotent. They begin a poorly-veiled secret affair by dancing and kissing rather openly at conference events, staying out nights, and spending days by German pools. Despite his gruff attitude and dirty sandals, he seems to provide what she desires but does not find in her own marriage: energy, excitement, desire, danger. Upon arriving, Isadora meets the English Langian analyst Adrian Goodlove and is immediately hooked. The narrator occupies her mind with many questions, plans, mental rough drafts and reminiscences as her journey unfolds, including the 'zipless fuck,' a major motif in the story that haunts the narrator throughout. She also associates fear and loathing with Germany, because she and her husband were stationed in Heidelberg and she struggled both to fit in and to wrestle with the hatred and danger she felt being a Jew in post-Holocaust Germany. Her fear of flying, both literally and metaphorically referring to a fear of freeing herself from the shackles of traditional male companionship, she associates with recent articles about plane hijackings and terrorist attacks. She is surrounded by analysts, several of them her own from over the years, and her husband, Bennett (also an analyst): 'There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I'd been treated by at least six of them' (page 5). Wing is on a plane flight to Vienna for the first psychoanalysts conference since analysts were driven out during the Holocaust. Isadora Wing is a Jewish journalist from New York City's Upper West Side. The book resonated with women who felt stuck in unfulfilling marriages, and it has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. 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. 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 novel's tone may be considered conversational or informal. On a trip to Vienna with her second husband, Isadora decides to indulge her sexual fantasies with another man.

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. It became controversial for its portrayal of female sexuality, and figured in the development of second-wave feminism. Fear of Flying is a 1973 novel by Erica Jong.

Fear of flying erica