Fear of Flying is the story of
Isadora Wing, one of the most hilarious and touching
anti- heroines to ever appear in fiction. A compulsive
daydreamer, a seeker of saviors and psychiatrists, the
author of a book of supposedly erotic poems, and a
full-fledged phobic who fears flying but will not allow
that fear to keep her off planes, Isadora relates her
adventures and misadventures with wit, exuberance, and
the sort of absolute candor that for centuries was
permitted only to men.
On a trip to Vienna to attend a
psycholanalytic congress with her psychiatrist husband,
she meets an uninhibited Laingian analyst who seems the
embodiment of all her steamiest fantasies. He lures her
away from her husband on an existential jaunt across
Europe, sleeping by roadsides, changing partners with
people met at campsites, re-evaluating her life in some
painful and funny ways. But the trip proves to be a
journey backward in time as well as a reshuffle of the
present..
Though Isadora fears flying (in all
possible senses of the word), she forces herself to keep
traveling, to risk her marriage and her life is pursuit
of her own brand of liberation. How she finds it and
loses her fear is what Fear of Flying is all
about.
There are over 6.5 million copies of Fear
of Flying in print in the U.S. alone. Around the world there are 12.5 million copies in print in 27 languages
Reviews:
"A passionate novel... the
body wanting sex, sex, sex and love and safety, comfort;
the mind wanting freedom, independence, the power to
work, to write... very alive and real. It is wonderfully
funny and sad, witty and agonizing, brilliant, sensual,
serious"
--Hannah Green
"It is rare these days to come
upon a book written by a woman which is so refreshing, so
gay an sad at the same time, and so full of wisdom about
the eternal man-woman problem"
--Henry Miller
"This book will make literary
history...because of it women are going to find their own
voice and give us great sagas of sex, life, joy, and
adventure."
--Henry Miller
"Transcends being a woman's book and becomes
a latter-day Ulysses, with a female Bloom stumbling and
groping, but surviving."
--Wall Street Journal
Fear of Flying
Signet reissue edition 1996
311 pages; paperback
ISBN: 0-451-18556-0 Published originally in hardcover by Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1973 -Top of Page-
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