Still Flying
by Rebecca Mead writing in The New Yorker April 14, 2008

Erica Jong, the novelist, essayist, and poet, has long lamented that “Fear of Flying,” which has sold more than eighteen million copies worldwide since it was published, in 1973, has overshadowed the remainder of her sizable oeuvre. “I used to worry that they would put zipless fuck on my tombstone,” she wrote in an afterword to a new edition some years ago.

Last year, however, after Columbia University acquired her literary papers, Jong agreed to the idea of holding a conference to celebrate the work as a feminist classic. The other day, Jong, in tangerine-colored jacket and with a mass of blond curls, was among the mostly female audience that filled a hall at the Union Theological Seminary to hear academics discuss the significance of what Michael Ryan, the head of Columbia’s rare-books-and-manuscripts collection, referred to as “a seminal work.”

For the full story link to The New Yorker here.......