In the 70’s, Erica Jong stunned and delighted readers with her jaw-dropping, powerful feminist voice.
We found ourselves always torn between the mothers in our heads and the women we needed to become simply to stay alive. With one foot in the past and another in the future, we hobbled through first love, motherhood, marriage, divorce, careers, menopause, widowhood —never knowing what or who we were supposed to be, staking out new emotional territory at every turn—like pioneers.
—Erica Jong. Fear of Fifty: A Midlife Memoir
This is me! How about you?
Erica Jong is one of my literary heroes. Coincidentally, we lived parallel paths: “Russian immigrant (grand)parents, intellectual Jewish household, child of privilege, multiple degrees, artistic career, marriage, daughter—and a turbulent relationship with her mother. A Jewish babe and emotional adventurer.” 1
In 1973, I was a junior in college when Jong published her groundbreaking, Fear of Flying.” Like her fictional—and heavily autobiographical—heroine, Isadora Wing, I, too, was trying to figure out my identity as the 2nd wave of feminism2 rolled in. At the time I was too young to think about the chances Jong took. I only knew that it was comforting to find a character who was struggling with the same shift of cultural norms, and it was energizing to read such intelligent humor and confusion. More from Erica Jong in Fear of Fifty: “I figure that if I’m confused, you are too. After all, we are the whiplash generation, raised to be Doris Day, yearning in our twenties to be Gloria Steinem.
I always say, “I entered college being told I was looking for a husband. By the time I graduated, I was expected to burn my bra.”
“Fear of Flying started it all . . . The one absolutely necessary read for any woman of any generation who wants to see herself as intellectually and sexually alive—or any man who wants to understand the smart, sexually lively woman. As fresh as the day it was written and unmissable.”—Naomi Wolf
“Fearless and fresh.”—John Updike, The New Yorker
“This book will make literary history.”—Henry Miller
“Outrageously entertaining.”—Cosmopolitan
My daughter is a litigator in L.A. In 2024, Molly Jong-Fast joined MSNBC as a political analyst. Woman power!
1Neely Tucker. The Washington Post. Oct. 2013.
2 The third wave gave birth to the Riot Grrrl movement and “girl power”. Feminist punk bands like Bikini Kill in the US and Pussy Riot in Russia sang about issues like homophobia, sexual harassment, misogyny, racism, and female empowerment. The fourth wave is epitomized by “digital or online feminism” which gained currency around 2013. In 2017, the Women’s March protested the inauguration of the decidedly misogynistic Donald Trump as US president. Approximately 500,000 women marched in Washington DC, with demonstrations held simultaneously in 81 nations. Woefully, we are coping with him again. (The fourth wave generation is connected via new communication technologies in ways that were not previously possible.)
