Advanced
Error loading page.
Try refreshing the page. If that doesn't work, there may be a network issue, and you can use our self test page to see what's preventing the page from loading.
Learn more about possible network issues or contact support for more help.
No sample available
Title details for How to Lose Your Mother by Molly Jong-Fast - Wait list

How to Lose Your Mother

A Daughter's Memoir

by Molly Jong-Fast
ebook
Pre-release: Expected June 3, 2025
0 of 1 copy available
Place a hold
0 of 1 copy available
“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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Library Journal

      January 1, 2025

      Jong-Fast, a writer at Vanity Fair and host of the podcast Fast Politics, offers a memoir about her famous mother (the author Erica Jong), their intense relationship, and her complicated childhood. Prepub Alert.

      Copyright 2025 Library Journal

      Copyright 2025 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Kirkus

      Starred review from March 15, 2025
      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(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

subjects

Languages

  • English

Loading