I’m on chapter 1 of Fear of Flying and there’s a lot to unpack.

In this chapter we are introduced to Isadora Wing, who is on a plane with psychoanalysts going to Vienna for a convention. First chapter and first paragraph and this (opinionated and contradictory) woman is on a roll.

She starts mocking.. well, everything she could think of.

She sees psychoanalysts, but she mocks them. Isadora mentioned that she “has seen six (analysts) and married the seventh”. She admires her first analysts who was German “witty, self-mocking, and unpretentious” and was not literal minded like other analysts. Towards the end of the chapter I feel that Isadora is intelligent, restless, and questions social norms, and she sees analysts because she wants to understand herself, why she thinks and behaves the way she does.`

She also mocks the psychoanalysts gathering for a conference in Vienna. These intellectuals are convening in the birthplace of Freudian psychoanalysis, while ignoring the fact that Austria either expelled or gassed Jewish intellectuals during the Third Reich.

She mocks marriage, that at some point stability leaves one longing for freedom and adventure. She mocks her own marriage with her analyst husband, that every decision goes through analysis, every decision “referred to the shrink, or the shrinking process”.

She mocks the American culture and her American upbringing that surrounded women with modern ideas and intellectual liberation, but were still emotionally and sexually trapped by traditional expectations.

Then, Isadora introduces us to the concept of “zipless fuck”, an uncomplicated sexual encounter: relationships with no emotional bargaining, no gender expectations, no romantic scripts, no social judgement; where a woman is neither a virtuous wife or a tragic adulteress; just a person with desires, fantasies, dissatisfactions, agency over her mind and body.

My initial instinct about Isadora is that she’s like a court jester, speaking uncomfortable truths about hypocrisy of the psychoanalysts, contradictions of marriage, and repression of women wrapped sharp humor. Facts masked as mockery. And because of that, she is neither moralized nor punished for doing so.

I was about to spiral into second-wave feminism.. but i guess i should allow myself at least two chapters more.