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.
Eleven years ago in Erica Jong's best-selling Fear of Flying, Isadora Wing was 29 and twice married—first to a psychotic Columbia University graduate student and next to Bennett Wing, a Chinese-American Freudian child psychiatrist with whom she fearfully flew to a Psychiatric Congress in Vienna. There she met Adrian Goodlove, a British Laingian psychiatrist who spouted existentialist theory, playfully squeezed her, thought Jewish girls "bloody good in bed" and so mesmerized Isadora that she dumped Bennett in Vienna and took off with Goodlove on a haphazard trans-European motor trip, during which the main hazard turned out to be not Goodlove's losing battles with tumescence but his plan all the while to keep a scheduled appointment with his wife and children in Cherbourg. Isadora, feeling betrayed, winged back to Bennett, let herself into his empty hotel room, climbed into his tub and lay there not certain whether she had returned to soak in the hot water of his bath or their marriage.
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