Molly Jong-Fast’s How to Lose Your Mother arrives as both a searing family memoir and a meditation on what it means to be the child of someone who belongs as much to the public as to their own family. The daughter of feminist icon Erica Jong—author of the groundbreaking Fear of Flying—Jong-Fast delivers a narrative that is simultaneously deeply personal and universally resonant, exploring the complex terrain of loving someone who was never quite present, even when they were physically there.
The Weight of Literary Inheritance
Jong-Fast writes with the precision of someone who has spent years in therapy unpacking the peculiar burden of being raised by a literary celebrity. Her mother, Erica Jong, achieved fame with Fear of Flying in 1973, five years before Molly’s birth, and that fame became a third presence in their relationship—sometimes protective, often intrusive, always demanding attention.
The memoir’s strength lies in Jong-Fast’s refusal to romanticize her childhood or demonize her mother. Instead, she presents Erica Jong as a complex figure: brilliant yet self-absorbed, loving yet emotionally unavailable, famous yet deeply insecure. Jong-Fast captures the peculiar loneliness of growing up with someone who could command a room full of strangers but struggled to focus on her own child for more than thirty minutes at a time.
A Year of Compounding Crises
The narrative centers on 2023, which Jong-Fast describes as her “annus horribilis”—a year when her mother’s dementia diagnosis coincided with her husband Matt’s pancreatic cancer diagnosis. This confluence of medical crises provides the memoir’s dramatic backbone, but Jong-Fast skillfully weaves in decades of backstory, creating a rich tapestry that illuminates how childhood experiences shaped her response to adult challenges.
Jong-Fast’s prose style mirrors her mother’s in its unflinching honesty and dark humor, but where Erica Jong often centered herself as the protagonist of every story, Molly Jong-Fast demonstrates remarkable self-awareness. She acknowledges her own failures as a daughter while refusing to absolve her mother of the damage caused by chronic alcoholism, narcissism, and emotional unavailability.
The Geography of Dysfunction
The memoir’s settings—from the “haunted” brownstone on East 94th Street to the white brick apartment building where Jong-Fast spent her teenage years—become characters themselves. Jong-Fast has a keen eye for the material details that reveal class anxiety and aspirational living. Her descriptions of shopping expeditions to Bergdorf Goodman with her mother read like ethnographic studies of wealthy New York bohemian life, complete with the financial recklessness and emotional shoplifting that characterized their relationship.
Particularly memorable are the scenes set in Italy, where young Molly accompanied her mother on romantic escapades. Jong-Fast’s adult perspective allows her to see these trips for what they were: inappropriate adventures where a child was expected to serve as witness to her mother’s affairs. The author’s return to Venice as an adult becomes a powerful metaphor for the impossibility of healing childhood wounds through geographical revisitation.
The Mechanics of Caregiving
One of the memoir’s most compelling aspects is Jong-Fast’s unflinching examination of her own limitations as a caregiver. When faced with placing her parents in an expensive nursing home, she acknowledges her relief alongside her guilt. Her honesty about hiring people to provide the emotional labor she cannot or will not give herself is both brutal and refreshing.
Jong-Fast’s decision to sell her parents’ possessions, including their precious book collection, becomes a powerful symbol of breaking free from the weight of literary legacy. Her admission that she was “jealous of the weird codependent life” her mother and stepfather shared reveals the complex emotions that adult children of difficult parents rarely admit publicly.
Structural and Stylistic Elements
The memoir’s structure, moving fluidly between past and present, mirrors the disorienting experience of dealing with a parent’s dementia. Jong-Fast’s prose style combines the confessional mode popularized by her mother’s generation with a Gen X ironic sensibility. Her ability to find dark humor in situations that might otherwise overwhelm speaks to her skill as a writer and her resilience as a person.
Areas for Critique
While Jong-Fast’s honesty is admirable, “How to Lose Your Mother” occasionally feels indulgent in its catalog of grievances. Some readers may find her privilege—private schools, luxury travel, access to the best medical care—difficult to sympathize with, even when acknowledging that wealth cannot protect against emotional neglect.
The book’s treatment of addiction, both her mother’s alcoholism and her own recovery, could have been more nuanced. While Jong-Fast is clear about the impact of her mother’s drinking, she sometimes relies on addiction as an explanatory catch-all rather than exploring the deeper psychological roots of her mother’s behavior.
Literary Context and Comparable Works
Jong-Fast joins a distinguished tradition of writers examining difficult parent-child relationships, following in the footsteps of memoirs like Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. Her work also echoes Joan Didion’s Blue Nights in its examination of a mother-daughter relationship complicated by grief and misunderstanding.
Unlike many celebrity memoirs, Jong-Fast’s work demonstrates genuine literary merit. Her previous novels, including Normal Girl and The Social Climber’s Handbook, established her as a writer capable of sharp social observation, skills that serve her well in this more personal territory.
The Universal in the Particular
What elevates How to Lose Your Mother beyond mere literary gossip is Jong-Fast’s ability to locate universal truths within her specific circumstances. Her exploration of what it means to be the “only child of a once-famous woman” speaks to broader questions about legacy, identity, and the ways children inherit not just their parents’ genes but their psychological patterns.
The memoir’s final sections, dealing with her stepfather’s death and her mother’s continued decline, achieve genuine poignancy. Jong-Fast’s recognition that she and Matt have become “the grown-ups now” provides a satisfying narrative arc while acknowledging that some forms of loss can never be fully processed or resolved.
Recommended Reading
Readers drawn to Jong-Fast’s unflinching family portrait of “How to Lose Your Mother” might also appreciate:
- Cheryl Strayed’s Wild – for its honest examination of mother-daughter relationships and grief
- Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club – for its portrayal of growing up with alcoholic parents
- Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? – for its exploration of maternal rejection and literary inheritance
- Alexandra Styron’s Reading My Father – for another daughter’s perspective on living with a famous writer parent
Final Assessment
How to Lose Your Mother succeeds as both a family memoir and a cultural document, capturing the particular challenges of growing up in literary New York while exploring themes that will resonate with anyone who has struggled to love a difficult parent. Jong-Fast’s refusal to offer easy redemption or false comfort makes this a more honest, if more challenging, read than many memoirs in this genre.
The book’s greatest strength lies in Jong-Fast’s ability to maintain perspective on her own story, recognizing both her mother’s limitations and her own. Her journey from desperate child seeking maternal attention to middle-aged woman finally able to set boundaries provides a compelling arc of psychological development.
While the memoir may not offer complete resolution—how could it, given the ongoing nature of dementia?—it provides something perhaps more valuable: a clear-eyed examination of how we become ourselves in relationship to our parents, and how we must ultimately learn to parent ourselves when they can no longer do so.
