How to Lose Your Mother
A Daughter's Memoir
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4.5 • 8 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“With propulsive humor and perspective on her annus horribilis, Jong-Fast achieves the memoir’s transformative work of alchemy, arming us all with lines so good you won’t just want to underline them, you will want to cut them out to share.” —The Washington Post
“This raw, intimate memoir is a stunning portrait of difficult relationships and how we survive them.” —People
“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.” —Anne Lamott
From the political writer and podcaster, a ferociously honest and disarmingly funny memoir about her elusive mother’s encroaching dementia and a reckoning with her complicated childhood
Molly Jong-Fast is the only child of a famous woman, writer Erica Jong, whose sensational book Fear of Flying launched her into second-wave feminist stardom. She grew up yearning for a connection with her dreamy, glamorous, just out of reach mother, who always seemed to be heading somewhere that wasn’t with Molly. When, in 2023, Erica was diagnosed with dementia just as Molly’s husband discovered he had a rare cancer, Jong-Fast was catapulted into a transformative year.
How to Lose Your Mother is a compulsively readable memoir about an intense mother–daughter relationship, a sometimes chaotic upbringing with a fame-hungry parent, and the upheavals that challenge our hard-won adulthood. A pitch-perfect balance of acceptance and rage, humor and heart, How to Lose Your Mother tells a universal story of loss alongside a singular story of a literary life. This is a memoir that will stand alongside the classics of the genre.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This memoir is emotionally complex, brutally honest, and unexpectedly funny. Author and podcaster Molly Jong-Fast recounts the year she became a reluctant caregiver to her mother, novelist and ’70s feminist icon Erica Jong, whose dementia was accelerating. In the process, Jong-Fast confronts a lifetime of deeply conflicted feelings about her larger-than-life but emotionally elusive mom while reckoning with their shared history of addiction. (On top of everything, she was also managing the Parkinson’s-related decline of her mother’s fourth husband.) Molly’s voice is witty, observational, and self-aware, managing to be unflinching about both her mother’s flaws and her own. But the book is also full of hard-won insight and genuine love for her often-exasperating family. If Crying in H Mart got you in the feels, How to Lose Your Mother absolutely will too.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Jong-Fast (The Social Climber's Handbook) chronicles the worst year of her life in this staggering self-portrait. 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. Looking back over her and Jong's relationship, Jong-Fast eloquently captures the loneliness she felt as "the only child of a once-famous mother" who was often inaccessible, leaving her daughter in the care of other women and dumping her lovers "the instant got sick or... boring." Conversely, she recalls Jong's intoxicating glamor, which led Jong-Fast to "adore more than a daughter has ever loved a mother." Resisting tidy sentiment or easy answers, Jong-Fast dives headfirst into the often-difficult ambiguities of parent-child bonds. The results are stunning.
