Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying swiftly moved into my top five favorite books this past week, which is not an easy feat. While most novels about New York and writing and sex typically peak my interest, Jong fictionalizes these subjects in the most sensational, staggering and seductive, ahead-of-her-time way that made me fall madly in love with her. She is an intrepid literary heroine and I saw a lot of myself in her twenty-something misadventures and struggles with writing. It is safe to say that Fear of Flying is one of those books that will forever change the way I write and the way I feel about myself intellectually, sexually and spiritually.

A few passages I underlined while reading:

• Why can’t my suffering at least be dignified? When other writers suffer it’s epic or avant-garde, but when I suffer it’s slapstick.

• It was as if my stomach thought of itself as a heart. And no matter how I filled it — with men, with books, with food, with gingerbread cookies shaped like men and poems shaped like men and men shaped like poems –- it refused to be still. Unfillable — that’s what I was. Nymphomania of the brain. Starvation of the heart.

• As a seasoned insomniac, I knew sometimes the way to beat sleeplessness was to outwit it: to pretend you didn’t care about sleeping. Then sometimes sleep became piqued, like a rejected lover, and crept up to try to seduce you.

• There are no atheists on turbulent airplanes.

• If you were female and talented, life was a trap no matter which way you turned. Either you drowned in domesticity (and had Walter Mittyish fantasies of escape) or you longed for domesticity in all your art. You could never escape your femaleness. You had conflict written in your very blood.

• I wanted to write about the whole world. I wanted to write War and Peace—or nothing.

• 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.

• I was the one they counted on to write out their fantasies. I was the one they counted on to tell funny stories about her former lovers. I was the one they envied in public and laughed at in private.

• It’s only when you’re forbidden to talk about the future that you suddenly realize how much the future normally occupies the present.

• The loneliness of writing terrified me. I looked for every excuse to escape. I had so sense of myself as a writer and no faith in my ability. I could not see then that I had been writing all my life.

• I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book.

• Life has no plot. It is far more interesting than anything you can say about it.