Fear of Flying: A Novel

"Fear of Flying is the story of Isadora Wing, one of the most hilarious and touching anti-heroines to ever appear in fiction. A compulsive daydreamer, a seeker of saviors and psychiatrists, the author of a book of supposedly erotic poems, and a full-fledged phobic who fears flying but will not allow that fear to keep her off planes, Isadora relates her adventures and misadventures with wit, exuberance, and the sort of absolute candor that for centuries was permitted only to men. On a trip to Vienna to attend a psycholanalytic congress with her psychiatrist husband, she meets an uninhibited Laingian analyst who seems the embodiment of all her steamiest fantasies. He lures her away from her husband on an existential jaunt across Europe, sleeping by roadsides, changing partners with people met at campsites, re-evaluating her life in some painful and funny ways. But the trip proves to be a journey backward in time as well as a reshuffle of the present... Though Isadora fears flying (in all possible senses of the word), she forces herself to keep traveling, to risk her marriage and her life is pursuit of her own brand of liberation. How she finds it and loses her fear is what Fear of Flying is all about."--Author's website (viewed February 9, 2023).