How to lose your mother : a daughter's memoir / Molly Jong-Fast.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Instant New York Times Bestseller

"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.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

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. Agent: Pilar Queen, UTA. (June)

Booklist Review

Political writer, commentator, and podcaster Jong-Fast identifies herself as "the only child of a once-famous woman," then launches a spiraling account of her "wildly conflicted" relationship with her mother, the writer Erica Jong. As she chronicles her beyond-unconventional childhood with the celebrity author of Fear of Flying, a 1973 novel that shocked the public with its frank depiction of female sexuality, Jong-Fast is bitingly candid about how her "glamorous and inaccessible" divorced mother, "a world-class narcissist," led a jet-setting, fame-focused life, leaving her lonely daughter with a nanny. Jong drank heavily and dated incessantly, while her daughter, whose grandfather, Howard Fast, and father, Jonathan Fast, were also writers, was unable to read due to dyslexia. Jong-Fast developed her own substance abuse problem as a teenager, but she got sober and stayed sober. Jong happily remarried, but her alcoholism worsened and was eventually compounded by dementia while her husband had Parkinson's, and Jong-Fast's husband faced cancer. This collision of crises spurred this edgy, angry, painful, and caustically funny memoir, in which Jong-Fast is almost as critical of herself as she is of her mother.

Kirkus Book Review

A self-described nepo baby faces the hardest part of nepo adulthood. Despite being the 50th anniversary of her mother's famous novel,Fear of Flying, 2023 was not easy for Jong-Fast, daughter of Erica Jong and Jonathan Fast--and an author, podcaster, political commentator, wife, and mother. Due to their declining mental states, her mother and stepfather had to be pried out of their apartment and moved, very unhappily, to assisted living. Her husband, Matt, 59, learned he had a mass on his pancreas; yes, it was cancer; and his own father was failing. This was not all. It has never been easy to be Erica Jong's daughter; her total involvement with her career and with the men in her life absorbed all her time and energy. "She couldn't even spendone hour with you," Jong-Fast's father tells her. "The most she could do was half an hour." There was a nanny, private schools, fancy hotel rooms, trips to Venice, celebrities galore, but it was far from a happy childhood: "I was born to privilege, born on third base, but desperate to strike out and go home." 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. A typical reflection: "My dad has a moral core, a kind of spirituality and a quest for joy that I do not have. I'm not even sure I'd want it. Which is perhaps not the greatest self-analysis." "I am a bad daughter," she tells us over and over, but it's pretty clear she did the best she could. The best book Jong-Fast could have written about the worst year of her life. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.