but it wasn’t here…
Yesterday, I noted that I’d recently written something about my search for Fear of Flying, but it turns out that was only in my journaled morning pages. It is a funny story, albeit a small amusement, so I’ll regale you.
I read Amy Meyerson’s Bookshop of Yesterdays recently on my beloved and well-used Kindle. In that book, there is….you guessed it….a bookstore called Tempest Books. The protagonist, inevitably but still charmingly called Miranda, finds Erica Jong’s runaway bestseller, a marvel of literary sexual freedom for women from 1973. In said year, I was in 11th grade and zipless or any other kinds of f&^cks were far from my thoughts. I led such a sheltered life that that word wasn’t even in my vocabulary until decades later.
So even now, in 2021, I have not yet read Fear of Flying, but the Bookshop of Yesterdays made me think it might be a good time. Why not now? So I headed to the public library to gather it and returned with Jong’s Fear of Dying, her 2016 paean to feminist aging. Isadora Wing makes more than an appearance, and this book does travel some of the old territory in a new vehicle with new sensibilities, I guess. I wish I had read Fear of Flying in my youth, because Fear of Dying struck close to me at this age.
So one book leads to another. And I’ll find myself a copy of Fear of Flying, sooner or later. In the meantime, the link to Amy’s book is below. It’s an affiliate link to the paperback. I read it in Kindle, and I do recommend it. Any story that has a bookstore, library or museum as a primary setting gets my vote. After all, I grew up on the From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Did you?