Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old work.
Accustomed as I am to having to defend my interest in Fear of Flying, I'll state at the outset why I find it important. Sexual liberation was an essential partof the early women's movement, and Fear of Flying has been taken seriously, if not as "literature," as an expression of sexual liberation—most recently, by Susan Suleiman in Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde, 1990 who describes it as "a significant gesture, both in terms of sexual politics and in terms of … sexual poetics," praises its "freshness and vitality" of language, and calls it a "fictional counterpart" to such books as Our Bodies, Our Selves (1973) and Shere Hite's Sexual Honesty, By Women for Women (1974), which similarly reclaim female bodies and sexuality for females. I confess to having liked the novel when it first appeared, though it does not bear up to rereading and I don't finally share Suleiman's enthusiasm. But as the only instance of feminist metafiction I know of to sell ten million copies, it was important as a vehicle for the dissemination of feminist ideas and for the controversy it sparked, and it deserves attention as a cultural document.
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