Life has no plot, says Isadora Zelda Wing, the protagonist and narrator of Fear of Flying, but "to help us along we create little fictions ... which clarify and shape our experience," Erica Jong, the writer, quotes Jerzy Kosinski. Fear of Flying is an attempt to create a fiction whose completion generates a novel and a novelist. It is an autobiography by a would-be novelist, or, to use Steven Kellman's phrase, a self-begetting novel.
Isadora, a poet and would-be novelist, seeks a "zipless fuck," and to have an odyssey with a lover. During the odyssey she attempts to retrieve her past, and affects by turns literary figures like Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, Colett and soon. At the end the lover proves to be no real zipless fuck and leaves her. So she must face her real self. When she reads her notebook, with many things jotted down in it, a revelation comes that the odyssey was an attempt to fly on her own wings, and that she need not apologize for it. With this revelation, the notebook turns into the novel.
Fear of Flying has an open ending; Isadora cannot get her zipless fuck nor does she leave her husband. That is a compromise and leaves Isadora and her creator in a state of frustration. The frustration leads them to write another novel, How to Save Your Own Life, in which Isadora gets her real zipless fuck. Thus the search for the zipless fuck completes itself as a metaphor for the search for the writer's identity as a woman novelist.