“How to Lose Your Mother” by Molly Jong-Fast

A snippet from the Publishers Weekly review describes what was happening in the terrible year that journalist Molly Jong-Fast chronicles in How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir: “In 2023, Jong-Fast’s mother, Erica Jong, celebrated the 50th anniversary of her groundbreaking novel, Fear of Flying. It was also the year Jong was diagnosed with dementia. As Jong-Fast prepared to care for her mother, more blows came: her husband was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and her stepfather’s Parkinson’s began to worsen. Jong-Fast’s life became a flurry of doctors, lawyers, and accountants, as she was forced to place her mother and stepfather in assisted living and clear out the apartment the couple shared.”

Selected Reviews of How to Lose Your Mother

Kirkus Reviews: “By the age of 19, Jong-Fast was in recovery; this, her 26th year of sobriety, was marked by the continuing damage and sorrow of her mother’s alcoholism. ‘So much of our lives have been about alcohol that it makes me want to cry.’ Jong-Fast is obsessive and merciless about her mother’s drinking as well as her many other profound character flaws, and the miracle of this book is that you feel no need to judge her for that. Her honesty, her self-awareness, and her grief keep you on her side, as well as her humor, understated, blunt, and sometimes black.”

Anne Lamott, author: “Molly Jong-Fast’s memoir is mesmerizing, intimate, wise, unputdownable, crazily honest, heartbreaking, funny, illuminating—beautiful and painful at the same time, just like real life.”

Lori Gottlieb, therapist/author: “A gripping memoir about mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, loss and healing, and what it means to finally accept your past and become an adult. Despite being raised in the shadow of fame, Molly tells a story that is both uniquely specific and utterly, exquisitely relatable.”

Selected Quotes from How to Lose Your Mother

I’ve always floated around like some kind of Erica Jong Rorschach test. I am a repository for people’s feelings about my mother, about feminism, about the sexual revolution.

My mother is just a body now. She has dementia. She has breath and hair and pretty blue eyes, but Erica Jong the person has left the planet.

My dad tried to reassure me in his own peculiar, fucked-up way. “You know,” he said, “when you were a little girl, the nanny and I used to try and get your mom to spend time with you. We tried to get her to spend just an hour a day with you.”

This admission made me feel so great.

“And she couldn’t do it,” my dad said. “She couldn’t even spend one hour with you. The most she could do was half an hour.”

The reason I knew Mom was a liar was because her story always changed. Sometimes it was one thing, then sometimes it was an entirely different story. This shifting reality, this strange post-truth ecosystem she inhabited, and that for a time I inhabited, too, made me completely unable to know what was real and what was a lie with her. It was a kind of gaslighting by proxy, like Munchausen syndrome, but somehow much, much stupider.

I had spent my entire life trying to get away from the loneliness of being abandoned by my parents. I assumed this would somehow preclude me from mourning their deaths. Like with almost everything in my life, I was deeply wrong. You can’t pre-grieve your parents, much as you might want to, or need to.