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Parachutes & Kisses
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Married (again) and divorced (again), Isadora Wing is a single parent with an adorable daughter, an irritating ex-husband, and a startling assortment of suitors: an unorthodox rabbi, a poetic disc jockey, the son of a famous sex therapist, and WASPily handsomest of all: Berkeley Sproul III. Isadora and Berkeley meet at a health club, and he's fourteen years her junior. Of course their affair is tortuous and sexy, but is it love? Or does the stud just want a free trip to Venice, compliments of a famous author? Either way, Erica Jong wrote this romance with "a mixture of eloquence and savage wit as good as anything she has ever written," said The Wall Street Journal.
416 pages, Paperback
First published October 1,1984
This edition
- Format
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416 pages, Paperback
- Published
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August 3, 2006 by Tarcher
- ISBN
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9781585425006
- ASIN
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1585425001
- Language
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English
About the author
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Erica Jong—novelist, poet, and essayist—has consistently used her craft to help provide women with a powerful and rational voice in forging a feminist consciousness. She has published 21 books, including eight novels, six volumes of poetry, six books of non-fiction and numerous articles in magazines and newspapers such as the New York Times, the Sunday Times of London, Elle, Vogue, and the New York Times Book Review.
In her groundbreaking first novel, Fear of Flying (which has sold twenty-six million copies in more than forty languages), she introduced Isadora Wing, who also plays a central part in three subsequent novels—How to Save Your Own Life, Parachutes and Kisses, and Any Woman's Blues. In her three historical novels—Fanny, Shylock's Daughter, and Sappho's Leap—she demonstrates her mastery of eighteenth-century British literature, the verses of Shakespeare, and ancient Greek lyric, respectively. A memoir of her life as a writer, Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life, came out in March 2006. It was a national bestseller in the US and many other countries. Erica's latest book, Sugar in My Bowl, is an anthology of women writing about sex, has been recently released in paperback.
Erica Jong was honored with the United Nations Award for Excellence in Literature. She has also received Poetry magazine's Bess Hokin Prize, also won by W.S. Merwin and Sylvia Plath. In France, she received the Deauville Award for Literary Excellence and in Italy, she received the Sigmund Freud Award for Literature. The City University of New York awarded Ms. Jong an honorary PhD at the College of Staten Island.
Her works have appeared all over the world and are as popular in Eastern Europe, Japan, China, and other Asian countries as they have been in the United States and Western Europe. She has lectured, taught and read her work all over the world.
A graduate of Barnard College and Columbia University's Graduate Faculties where she received her M.A. in 18th Century English Literature, Erica Jong also attended Columbia's graduate writing program where she studied poetry with Stanley Kunitz and Mark Strand. In 2007, continuing her long-standing relationship with the university, a large collection of Erica's archival material was acquired by Columbia University's Rare Book & Manuscript Library, where it will be available to graduate and undergraduate students. Ms. Jong plans to teach master classes at Columbia and also advise the Rare Book Library on the acquisition of other women writers' archives.
Calling herself “a defrocked academic,” Ms. Jong has partly returned to her roots as a scholar. She has taught at Ben Gurion University in Israel, Bennington College in the US, Breadloaf Writers' Conference in Vermont and many other distinguished writing programs and universities. She loves to teach and lecture, though her skill in these areas has sometimes crowded her writing projects. “As long as I am communicating the gift of literature, I'm happy,” Jong says. A poet at heart, Ms. Jong believes that words can save the world.
In her groundbreaking first novel, Fear of Flying (which has sold twenty-six million copies in more than forty languages), she introduced Isadora Wing, who also plays a central part in three subsequent novels—How to Save Your Own Life, Parachutes and Kisses, and Any Woman's Blues. In her three historical novels—Fanny, Shylock's Daughter, and Sappho's Leap—she demonstrates her mastery of eighteenth-century British literature, the verses of Shakespeare, and ancient Greek lyric, respectively. A memoir of her life as a writer, Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life, came out in March 2006. It was a national bestseller in the US and many other countries. Erica's latest book, Sugar in My Bowl, is an anthology of women writing about sex, has been recently released in paperback.
Erica Jong was honored with the United Nations Award for Excellence in Literature. She has also received Poetry magazine's Bess Hokin Prize, also won by W.S. Merwin and Sylvia Plath. In France, she received the Deauville Award for Literary Excellence and in Italy, she received the Sigmund Freud Award for Literature. The City University of New York awarded Ms. Jong an honorary PhD at the College of Staten Island.
Her works have appeared all over the world and are as popular in Eastern Europe, Japan, China, and other Asian countries as they have been in the United States and Western Europe. She has lectured, taught and read her work all over the world.
A graduate of Barnard College and Columbia University's Graduate Faculties where she received her M.A. in 18th Century English Literature, Erica Jong also attended Columbia's graduate writing program where she studied poetry with Stanley Kunitz and Mark Strand. In 2007, continuing her long-standing relationship with the university, a large collection of Erica's archival material was acquired by Columbia University's Rare Book & Manuscript Library, where it will be available to graduate and undergraduate students. Ms. Jong plans to teach master classes at Columbia and also advise the Rare Book Library on the acquisition of other women writers' archives.
Calling herself “a defrocked academic,” Ms. Jong has partly returned to her roots as a scholar. She has taught at Ben Gurion University in Israel, Bennington College in the US, Breadloaf Writers' Conference in Vermont and many other distinguished writing programs and universities. She loves to teach and lecture, though her skill in these areas has sometimes crowded her writing projects. “As long as I am communicating the gift of literature, I'm happy,” Jong says. A poet at heart, Ms. Jong believes that words can save the world.
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Community Reviews
Rating(3.9 / 5.0, 46 votes)
5 stars
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46 reviews All reviews
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Not NEARLY as entertaining as Fear of Flying or How to Save Your Own Life, which was disappointing. Isadora grows up, and its pretty boring and sad. I guess thats reality, though.
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I was in high school when Fear of Flying came out and reading it was a bit of a rite of passage. Most of us, lacking any actual sex scenes of our own, read about Isadora's without any informed idea as to their accuracy. I read Parachutes & Kisses in my mid-twenties, and it has a special spot in my memory for how accurate it was. Not about sex. To be honest, I don't remember what I thought of the sex in the book at all. However, in my mid-twenties I gave birth to my daughter by C-section, right at the height of everyone extolling the glories of natural childbirth. Stories, both true and fictional, about natural childbirth were, pardon the pun, popping out all over the place. There was a judgmental attitude towards women who ended up taking painkillers at all during labour and who ended up having C-sections. It was easy to feel disappointed, cheated even, that I ended up having a C-section after 50 hours of labour. Implicitly, I had failed and my body had failed me. About six months later I picked up Parachutes & Kisses and could tell early on in the story that at some point a description of Isadora giving birth was in store. I braced myself for the inevitable natural childbirth scene, the "summitting Everest without oxygen while listening to Beethoven's 9th symphony" combination of accomplishment and awe that such descriptions were loaded with at the time. Instead, I felt so grateful when Isadora, after a long labour, had a C-section in a passage written by someone who has either had one, or talked to someone who has. Jong got it right, down to how much you feel during one and describing how much longer it takes to get all the various layers stitched up than it does to get the baby out. As an author, Jong could have shaped Isadora's story any way she chose, and she chose, for whatever reason, to go against the trend of the time by including a C-section. So, although not a particularly memorable book otherwise, this novel gets an extra star from me for the much-needed-at-the-time sense of validation those few pages gave me.
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Erica Jong is a difficult writer for me to read. The best way I can explain it is to say that her rhythms and mine do not mesh well. But much of her writing is inspired. I give her extra points for prose that frequently surprises me and makes me smile.
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I read this book in 1985 when I was sixteen. My High School English teacher recommended it.
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Beautifully written as always for Jong but disappointing follow up to How to Save your own life. I understand the pain of her divorce but instead of an introspective novel she continues to look outside herself for comfort.
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No Fear of Flying but still very funny, intelligent and charming.
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Women can get better and more passionate as they age.
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