Readers may recall the autobiographical, sexually explicit novel, Fear of Flying, published in 1973. Its wildly, popular author, second wave feminist, Erica Jong made a powerful contribution to feminist literature with a focus on “women’s sexual desires” equating or surpassing these with their male counterparts. In her new memoir, How to Lose Your Mother, published in 2025, Molly Jong-Fast, Erica’s daughter, writes about her private life out of the limelight with crushing memories of her childhood amid her mother’s struggles with alcoholism and dementia.
Born into a famous literary family, author Molly Jong-Fast acknowledges, “I was a bad daughter”. Citing years of addiction to drugs, diet pills and obsessive exercise, she writes about her own depression followed by years of therapy with a ‘celebrity shrink’. She points to her emotional problems all arising from, “the benign neglect” from her famous mother. Molly spares no ink accusing her mother of being “incapable of mothering,” abandoning her daughter for the sake of celebrity and fame. She describes a “nightmarish” childhood asserting her mother “never got over being famous”. Her fame “eclipsed everything”. An icon for “women’s lib” Mom Erica Jong was, in fact, a superstar on covers of magazines newspapers and a frequent guest on talk shows. Oprah used to call to chat.
Growing up amid confusion and chaos, Molly writes about her mother’s frequent change in husbands and even greater infidelity during her marriages. Married four times, Molly claims her mother “was always madly in love”. As a child, Molly felt insignificant “a peripheral character” in one of her mother’s novels cowering under her mother’s unpredictability, her “chronic exhibitionism without any filter”. Never feeling she was a part of her mother’s life, Molly struggled with the love she felt for her mother and the values she espoused though years of therapy, forging her own identity.
The most poignant chapters in the book deal with her mother’s tragic descent into dementia, the denials, the lies, and the anger associated with her diminishing memory. And the delusion beneath a lavish and extravagant life style pretending all problems could be solved by going to Bergdorf Goodman’s or with a glass of wine. Erica Jong cherished her life of celebrity, her daughter Molly was just another “accessory to fame.” However, when her mother shows signs of declining mental acuity, Molly becomes her mother’s care giver who has to convince her mother that she cannot live in her own huge house, rather she needs a nursing home where she would be safe —from herself.
An inspiring memoir author Molly Jong Fast brings out the complex relationship between mothers and daughters, the ravages of fame and challenges to find a separate and independent identity. A touching tender and poignant memoir.