Ephron, French, Jong

I began two novels in Heidelberg. Both of them had male narrators. I just assumed that nobody would be interested in a woman’s point of view. Besides, I didn’t want to risk being called all the things women writers (even good women writers) are called: “clever, witty, bright, touching, but lacks scope.”
I ­wanted to write about the whole world, I wanted to write War and Peace—or nothing. No “lady writer” subjects for me. I was going to have battles and bullfights and jungle safaris. Only I didn’t know a damn thing about battles and bullfights and jungle safaris (and neither do most men). I languished in utter frustration, thinking that the subjects I knew about were “trivial” and “feminine”—while the subjects I knew nothing of were “profound” and “masculine.” No matter what I did, I felt I was bound to fail. Either I would fail by writing or fail by not writing. I was paralyzed.

—Erica Jong, Fear of Flying

Their ideas were intolerable, but their penises were silky.     

—Erica Jong, Fear of Flying

Fear of Flying made me a tween women’s libber back in 1986. Or at least it kept me from putting away my childhood obsession with feminism. I was between sixth and seventh grades, and had just come home from my first summer at overnight camp. I’d learned the hard way at weekly dances that twelve-year-old boys didn’t go for my non-Guess gypsy wardrobe, my habit of carrying a book everywhere, and my compulsion to say exactly what I thought. It’s not that I imagined boys would be attracted by my love of the Brontë sisters and the ERA—I just didn’t realize those things would be romantic deal-breakers. I came home in August thinking I needed new clothes and less weird hobbies.

My hippie father, always worried that I was going to betray my upbringing and conform on him, came to the rescue with Erica Jong. “This is a very important book about being a woman,” he told me. “There’s some sexual stuff in it that’s maybe inappropriate for you—I guess you could skim those parts—but the chapters about her mother are really moving.” All I had to hear was that it was dirty.
I ­started the book immediately.

I was an obsessive reader, especially of books by women. How­ever, my favorites were often by men. From Huckleberry Finn to Portnoy’s Complaint, they usually had more excitement, more guts than those by women. I’d rewrite them in my head, giving Holden Caulfield a girlfriend who could match him in wit and discontent.

Fear of Flying was different, and not just because of...