How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir by Molly Jong-Fast

Molly Jong-Fast's frank memoir explores her complicated, unsatisfying relationship with her famous mother Erica as she faces dementia--and as Molly realizes that her hopes for a healthy, supportive, or caring mother-daughter connection are quickly fading away.

This is the story of what happens when the bottom falls out, when all the tests come back bad, when the doctors tell you there's nothing more they can do. This is the story of the worst year of my life.

Molly Jong-Fast is the only child of the feminist icon Erica Jong. Throughout her childhood, Molly found herself yearning for more time with her busy, glamorous mother. But Erica was focused on basking in the success of her book Fear of Flying, and Molly spied her mother in magazines, on TV, but rarely at their home. Molly was raised by a loyal nanny who held traditional values and imparted schedules on Molly, attempting to counteract the chaos, drinking, instability, and drama that her mother steadily imposed upon the household when she was present.

There was no version of Mom who was just for me.... Her fans got the same Erica Jong I did. There was no private individual. There was just Erica Jong, Feminist Icon, except that she was really not that feminist, and really not that iconic.

In 2023, Erica was diagnosed with dementia; her husband, Molly's stepfather, suffered physical and mental weakness; the Fasts' beloved dog fell deathly ill; and Molly's husband was diagnosed with a rare cancer. While trying to keep her head above water, Molly wrote this book, trying to turn an honest eye on her past, acknowledge her own fallibilities, and process the events of her life with a frank, sometimes bitter, and, often, forgiving point of view.

I was of course thinking about this book you are now, for better or worse, reading. This book was now going to destroy my life, I had decided. This book about the myriad ways I had betrayed my mother, and the strategies I had used to stay alive. I had a little bit of survivor's guilt about my childhood, I guess.

How to Lose Your Mother is a poignant, sharp, darkly funny memoir of a challenging, volatile relationship, and, when faced with loss, accepting another person's limitations and facing what feels like the impossible: letting go.

Everyone was dying. Everyone was always dying, all the time. For my whole life, no one ever died, and now everyone was dying all around me.

Jong-Fast's self-reflection is powerful, particularly when she considers her present-day unwillingness to take in her alcoholic, very ill mother and stepfather and her guilt in settling them in a nearby retirement community, selling their apartment and its contents, and retaining the aides they relied upon when they were working to assist them on site--all while they each begged to return "home."

Jong-Fast recognizes late in the book that her complicated relationship with her mother caused her to discount her longtime stepfather's steady presence in her mother's and her own life, but her childhood pain at never garnering her mother's attention or care got in the way of any closeness she and her father may have developed.

The author explores her lifelong adoration of her mother, her mother's limitations (Erica often told Molly and others how much she loved Molly, but she didn't express this through time, dedication, or caring; and Molly reflects with pain that her mother didn't protect her, for example, from inappropriate attention from a fellow grown-man houseguest when Molly was just 14), and her longtime desire to have a more fulfilling relationship with her mother--with the crushing realization that because of her dementia, the little hope Molly held out for this would be quashed.

About the Author--and More Memoirs

Molly Jong-Fast is a journalist, political commentator, and the author of The Social Climber's Handbook, Normal Girl, Girl, and The Sex Doctors in the Basement.

I received a prepublication version of this book courtesy of NetGalley and Viking Books.

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