HOW TO LOSE YOUR MOTHER: A Daughter’s Memoir, by Molly Jong-Fast
“Pour one out for me,” Molly Jong-Fast writes in “How to Lose Your Mother,” her memoir of “the worst year of my life,” 2023, in which her stepfather dies, her husband is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and her famous, forever unreachable mother succumbs to dementia. But she’s not referring to all that: She’s referring to one sentence in the best-selling 1973 novel “Fear of Flying,” which made Erica Jong into a second-wave feminist icon, offering a woman’s perspective on no-strings-attached sex, or what she called the “zipless fuck.”
“Think about being the offspring of the person who wrote that,” Jong-Fast writes.
In the memoir, the political journalist and novelist describes her childhood with a mother who had more time for media interviews and dinner parties than she had for her child. Jong “went from man to man trying to find an identity,” the daughter writes, while leaving her with a nanny Jong then fires when it suits her. At times “I bristled at the whole project of this memoir,” Jong-Fast writes: “a daughter trying to come to terms with the loss of a mother. But I never had Erica Jong. How can you lose something you never had?”
When her mother did pay attention, her affections were erratic. Jong-Fast “started going to Venice as a child because my mother had a lover there,” she writes, an Italian man who was married to a German countess. Jong would spontaneously invite her daughter into her bed to watch TV and eat Ben & Jerry’s, and take her on budget-less shopping sprees at Bergdorf’s. “Mom had that fairy dust,” Jong-Fast recalls thinking at the time. “There was just a feeling with Mom that anything could happen. … She was singularly the most glamorous and inaccessible person I’d ever known.”
As a teenager Jong-Fast copes with the chaos via drugs and alcohol, then gets sober at 19. When she tells her mother, a lifelong alcoholic and narcissist, that she wants to go to rehab “because I’m going to die,” Jong replies: “I think you’re being overdramatic.” (She has a similar response decades later, when Jong-Fast nearly dies in childbirth.)
At the same time, Jong-Fast says, “she was always so proud of me, always so delighted by everything I did.” But this attempt at magnanimity feels at odds with her suggestion that Jong needed her to succeed, lest the child’s failure reflect poorly on the mother herself. Having overcome a learning disability to end up in a profession similar to her mother’s, Jong-Fast has written a memoir that feels like an effort to transcend her mother’s narrative with her own, while still remaining deeply bound to the family form.
Jong-Fast is cognizant of both her nepo-baby privilege and the thorny ethics of writing a memoir about an ailing parent. Yet she remains unsparing in her analysis, and grief and rage coincide with comedy and uptown-literati charm. Jong is often out “fighting with Elaine, the owner of Elaine’s, the famous (infamous?) restaurant on the Upper East Side”; Nora Ephron is a “frenemy.” Sotheby’s arrives at Jong’s apartment intending to “do an auction with my mother’s stuff, just as they’d done with Joan Didion,” she writes. “But then they apparently decided that Mom was not good enough for Sotheby’s.”
Didion was superior to her mother, she decides, because “Joan had the advantage of not just writing about herself, and about being interested in other things.”
Reconciliation between mother and daughter becomes impossible as Jong’s mind continues to slip, and Jong-Fast notes “the bereft, broken feeling of something ending before it ever got the chance to start.” And yet, the reader might find an unexpected resolution in “Fear of Flying” itself. The protagonist, Isadora, is a 29-year-old writer who resists having a family in favor of a series of intense love affairs. But “really, I thought, sometimes I would like to have a child,” Jong wrote five years before Jong-Fast was born. “A very wise and witty little girl who’d grow up to be the woman I could never be. A very independent little girl … who said what she meant and meant what she said.”
Reading “How to Lose Your Mother,” one senses that the mother got the very daughter she wanted, even if she had no idea what to do with her when she arrived.
HOW TO LOSE YOUR MOTHER: A Daughter’s Memoir | By Molly Jong-Fast | Viking | 242 pp. | $28
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