This is cheesy to admit, but finishing Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying made me feel like I’d earned membership into an exclusive club. By the end, I identified with Isadora and like her, felt it was time to reach my comfortable cruising altitude.
I also felt Jong perfectly captured my fascination with and inspiration from the mundane, which have largely governed what I love to read, write, and talk about.
“The wonder of everyday life fascinates me even more than the wonder of great shrines and temples. That Beethoven could write such music while living in two shabby rooms in Vienna - this was the miracle… Somewhere between the bathroom and the bedroom, somewhere between eating an egg and taking a crap, the muse alights. She does not usually appear where your banal Hollywood notions have led you to most expect her - in a gorgeous sunset over Ischia, in the pounding surf of Big Sur, on a mountaintop in Delphi - but she wings in while you are peeling onions or eating eggplant or lining the garbage can with the book-review section of The New York Times.”
