![]() The novel also features, as Vanessa’s best friend, Jong’s most famous fictional avatar, Isadora Wing, protagonist of her 1973 bestseller and cause célèbre Fear of Flying. Vanessa is both a character – a well-known actress and screenwriter attempting to buoy up a happy but sexually inert marriage with online dating – separate from Erica Jong and a mouthpiece for Jong’s own bouncy observations about loss, sex, feminism, parent- and grandparenthood, fame and romance. “I’m nearly an orphan.” The line captures not only Vanessa’s own self-confessed immaturity, and her awed trepidation about a world not containing her beloved parents, but also a sense that dawns on many of us as we age: that there is no magic key to a kingdom called adulthood in which decisions make sense and uncertainties dissolve that we will always feel little inside. “I’m a grown-up,” insists Vanessa Wonderman, the 60-year-old protagonist of Erica Jong’s ninth novel. ![]()
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