I was in high school when Fear of Flying came out and reading it was a bit of a rite of passage. Most of us, lacking any actual sex scenes of our own, read about Isadora's without any informed idea as to their accuracy. I read Parachutes & Kisses in my mid-twenties, and it has a special spot in my memory for how accurate it was. Not about sex. To be honest, I don't remember what I thought of the sex in the book at all. However, in my mid-twenties I gave birth to my daughter by C-section, right at the height of everyone extolling the glories of natural childbirth. Stories, both true and fictional, about natural childbirth were, pardon the pun, popping out all over the place. There was a judgmental attitude towards women who ended up taking painkillers at all during labour and who ended up having C-sections. It was easy to feel disappointed, cheated even, that I ended up having a C-section after 50 hours of labour. Implicitly, I had failed and my body had failed me. About six months later I picked up Parachutes & Kisses and could tell early on in the story that at some point a description of Isadora giving birth was in store. I braced myself for the inevitable natural childbirth scene, the "summitting Everest without oxygen while listening to Beethoven's 9th symphony" combination of accomplishment and awe that such descriptions were loaded with at the time. Instead, I felt so grateful when Isadora, after a long labour, had a C-section in a passage written by someone who has either had one, or talked to someone who has. Jong got it right, down to how much you feel during one and describing how much longer it takes to get all the various layers stitched up than it does to get the baby out. As an author, Jong could have shaped Isadora's story any way she chose, and she chose, for whatever reason, to go against the trend of the time by including a C-section. So, although not a particularly memorable book otherwise, this novel gets an extra star from me for the much-needed-at-the-time sense of validation those few pages gave me.
Erica Jong always reminds me of an author of “dirty books” and I was excited when I found this book at a local library book sale to see what she was all about. Although there were numerous detailed sexual escapades that Isadora encounters, the story was more of her searching for balance and stability as she is approaching a mature 40 and going through another divorce, but this time with a young daughter to consider. If you haven’t matured or grown up in the 70-80’s some of the issues may be hard to relate to. On a personal note, being a Connecticut native I found some of the story notations especially about the harsh winters amusing.
What do You think about Parachutes & Kisses (2006)?
Parts of this book are laugh-out-loud hilarious, and parts are absolutely maddening. It came out in 1984, sequel to the much-ballyhooed Fear of Flying, and our heroine, Isadora Wing, is clearly Jong's alter ego. She's recently separated from husband number three, a perpetual adolescent she's still pining for, and has a three-year-old daughter she purports to love dearly but who gets very lost in the shuffle. The shuffle of Isadora's sex life, that is - described in exhaustive (sometimes exhausting just to read) detail. Jong is purportedly a seminal (you should pardon the expression) feminist, but it seems to me that our heroine here, despite all her wealth and beauty, is still waiting for men to define her life. I kept reading because... well, it was extremely entertaining, but I kept muttering to myself about how self-absorbed Isadora was and wondering how, even with all her fame and fortune, she's made such weird choices and then continues to bitch about the results. Looking up the author just now, I see that she has a new novel, Fear of Dying, coming out in September...
—Kathe
