Ever since she was a child, Molly Jong-Fast has struggled with the disorienting feeling that there are two versions of her.
There’s her real self, then there’s her literary doppelgänger, the Molly-like character who crops up frequently in her mother Erica Jong’s memoirs and novels. Whenever a stranger or acquaintance seemed to know intimate details about her — like her bratty behavior as a teenager, or her struggles with drug and alcohol addiction — Ms. Jong-Fast would freeze. She had to assume they had read all about her in her mother’s books.
Naturally, she resented having her private life, including some of her worst moments, repurposed as literary fodder. So she recognizes that some will see her brutally honest, scorched-earth memoir about her mother — a feminist and cultural icon who is now 83 and has dementia — as an act of literary retribution. She doesn’t entirely disagree.
“It feels like a huge betrayal,” Ms. Jong-Fast said in an interview at her bright and spacious apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where she sipped a cappuccino and cradled Bucephalus, one of her three small white Chinese crested dogs, in her lap. “I sold out Erica Jong, but it’s sort of in honor of her.”
Ms. Jong became famous with the release of her 1973 debut novel, “Fear of Flying” — a story about a married woman’s pursuit of casual sex. It became a critical and commercial blockbuster that drew praise from John Updike and Henry Miller and went on to sell more than 20 million copies. Ms. Jong was lauded for her unapologetic depictions of women’s pursuit of sexual pleasure and autonomy, back when such subjects were still scandalous. She was equally uninhibited about exposing personal details in her memoirs and interviews, and ruthlessly pillaged from the lives of those around her. Anyone in her orbit risked being reanimated as thinly disguised characters in her work — friends, husbands, boyfriends and exes, as well as the person she professed to love most, her only child, Molly.
Now 46 years old and 27 years sober, Ms. Jong-Fast has escaped from her mother’s long shadow and become a quasi-celebrity in her own right. She’s a vocal opponent of President Trump, and rose to prominence as a left-wing political commentator during his first term. She has since established herself in nearly every corner of the media landscape: She’s a special correspondent for Vanity Fair; hosts a podcast, “Fast Politics”; appears regularly on MSNBC as a political analyst; and posts relentlessly on X, Instagram, Threads and Bluesky. On the morning we met, she arrived at her apartment a few minutes after me, apologizing profusely over a chorus of yipping dogs and wearing a full face of thick television makeup after an appearance on “Morning Joe.”
“That’s why I look like a showgirl,” she deadpanned in her gravelly lilt.
When she gets approached on the street now, it’s mostly by admirers who see her on TV, not people who read her mother’s work.
Still, even as she has forged her own brand as an omnipresent political pundit and extremely online heroine of the anti-Trump resistance, Ms. Jong-Fast struggles under the weight of her mother’s legacy and how it has defined her.
So a few years ago, when Ms. Jong’s memory began to slip, Ms. Jong-Fast decided it was time to tell her side of the story. After all, she reasoned, it’s just what her mother would do.
“The tables are turned and I’m doing to her exactly what she always did to me,” Ms. Jong-Fast writes in her memoir, “How to Lose Your Mother,” which comes out June 3.
“How to Lose Your Mother” raises complicated questions about whether memoir, an inherently biased form, can ever capture the full truth — and about who controls the narrative in a family of writers. Taken together, the collective works of Erica Jong and her daughter, who has written semi-autobiographical fiction of her own, complement and contradict each other. They fit together awkwardly like pieces of a broken vessel — the overall shape coheres, but the jagged edges don’t always align.
Ms. Jong’s dementia adds another messy layer to the story. Now that Ms. Jong-Fast has seized the narrative reins from her mother, Ms. Jong remains in the dark: Ms. Jong-Fast said she hasn’t given her mother a copy because her memory issues make it difficult for her to retain information. In her book, she wonders whether her mother’s condition gave her cover to publish her counternarrative.
“Do I pretend that I am absolved — or at least safe in my public judgments about her — because I know she will never be able to read what I’m writing?” she writes.
In her memoir, Ms. Jong-Fast describes the disconcerting feeling of growing up alongside fictional versions of yourself, never feeling in control of your identity.
“It’s a really bizarre experience, and she nails it,” said Susan Cheever, daughter of the writer John Cheever, who has a forthcoming book about her famous father.
“Molly’s taking her life back,” said Ms. Cheever, a friend of the Jong family, adding, “The book is an act of reclamation.”
Ms. Jong-Fast follows in her mother’s footsteps in one crucial way: She holds nothing back. With the kind of withering, close-to-the-bone judgments that only a daughter can level at her mother, she takes Ms. Jong apart, describing her as a fame-chasing, alcoholic narcissist who had little time for or interest in her daughter, except as “her accessory” or as a subject she could mine for her books.
She calls Ms. Jong “a terrible mother” who had a “staggering lack of self-awareness” and was self-absorbed to an almost pathological degree, “constitutionally incapable of being honest.” In Ms. Jong-Fast’s account, her mother was so frequently drunk that when she grew increasingly forgetful a few years ago, it was hard to pinpoint her cognitive decline until a doctor diagnosed Ms. Jong’s dementia.
Ms. Jong-Fast describes how her mother, who was always put together and glamorous, with her arresting blue eyes and buoyant blond waves, rapidly deteriorated during the pandemic, when she began staying in bed all day, drinking a bottle or two of wine.
As her memory worsened, Ms. Jong sometimes refused to bathe for long stretches, and the apartment Ms. Jong lived in with her now deceased husband smelled like urine — both dog and human, Ms. Jong-Fast writes. In 2023, worried for their safety, she moved her mother and stepfather to a nursing home, to her mother’s distress.
Now, by following the family tradition of indiscretion, Ms. Jong-Fast may be mangling her mother’s reputation, but in a weird way, she’s honoring her legacy.
“My mom always said to me, You sit down at the computer and you open a vein,” she said. “Why bother writing a memoir if you’re not going to tell the whole story?”
Reached by phone recently, Ms. Jong, who now lives in a luxury senior residence in Manhattan with a full-time aide, still agreed with that principle, even now that their roles are reversed.
“When you’re a writer, your life is really an open book, and that’s true also for your child,” said Ms. Jong, who sounded sharp and cheerfully upbeat about her daughter’s memoir, noting that she hadn’t yet read it but planned to.
Asked about Ms. Jong-Fast’s bleak account of her upbringing, and her descriptions of Ms. Jong’s excessive drinking and more recent health issues, Ms. Jong seemed unfazed, and said she expected her daughter’s memoir to be unsparing.
“I write about her, she writes about me,” Ms. Jong said. “If you want to be an honest writer, you have to speak about it all. None of it bothers me.”
I had met Ms. Jong once before, about 10 years ago, when I interviewed her about “Fear of Dying,” her raunchy 2015 novel about a 60-year-old grandmother seeking sexual and romantic adventure. When I visited Ms. Jong at her Upper East Side apartment, she was vivacious and hilarious. “Older people are not supposed to have sex, according to their children,” she told me with cheerful amusement.
I later called Ms. Jong-Fast to ask her how she felt about being featured in the novel as Glinda, the main character’s emotionally needy daughter. “It would not have been my first choice,” Ms. Jong-Fast told me then.
So it felt strange, a decade later, to be sitting in Ms. Jong-Fast’s kitchen, asking whether her often unflattering portrait of her mother felt like a betrayal.
Ms. Jong-Fast seemed conflicted at times.
“Had she been with it, she would not like this,” she conceded at one point. “Even though she always said my whole life that I could write anything I wanted about her, I don’t really think she meant it.”
Then again, she reasoned, her mother always loved attention.
“Erica Jong would have hated this book and loved this book,” she said.
When Ms. Jong-Fast was born in 1978, Erica Jong was at the height of her fame. For much of her childhood, her charismatic mother was everywhere: appearing on “The Tonight Show,” on the cover of Newsweek, in the crossword puzzle. “Fear of Flying” entered the popular lexicon with Ms. Jong’s inventive term for no-strings-attached sex (for the innocent reader, it begins with “zipless” and ends with an expletive).
Ms. Jong-Fast’s parents separated when she was 3, and she was mostly raised by her nanny, she writes. On the occasions when Ms. Jong showered her with attention — inviting her to eat ice cream and watch TV in bed with her, taking her on shopping sprees or trips to Italy and Los Angeles — she basked in it.
“There were moments when she was the greatest mom ever,” Ms. Jong-Fast said.
But day to day, her mother was absent, consumed with the business of being Erica Jong, Ms. Jong-Fast said.
As a teenager, Ms. Jong-Fast started drinking heavily and did “mountains of cocaine.” When she was 19, she told her mother she needed to go to rehab. In her memoir, she describes how Ms. Jong at first said she was being melodramatic before agreeing she needed help. Shortly after, mother and daughter flew to Minnesota, where Ms. Jong-Fast spent a month at a rehab facility. In Ms. Jong-Fast’s telling, her mother left her at the airport with a driver and immediately caught a flight home to New York.
Many of these experiences, including some of the lowest points of her life, were rehashed in Ms. Jong’s books.
Afraid of what version of herself she might encounter, Ms. Jong-Fast has avoided reading her mother’s work, she said.
“My whole life, I was an object rather than a subject,” she said.
In her own books, Ms. Jong characterized her daughter’s upbringing very differently. In her 1994 memoir “Fear of Fifty.” she described dropping everything the moment Molly came home from school: “She claims all my attention. I become her sidekick, her buddy, her duenna, her walking credit card.”
She writes about spoiling her daughter with shopping sprees (this point they agree on) and being overwhelmed by love and concern. In her later memoir, “Seducing the Demon,” he recalls agonizing over her daughter’s addiction and worrying that she failed to notice it, and writes about taking Ms. Jong-Fast to rehab. (In Ms. Jong’s version, she drove with her to the facility, holding her hand, and spent the night, leaving only when she was certain her daughter was safe.)
Ms. Jong also predicted that one day, her daughter would come after her in print.
“Molly already knows that I’m her material, just as she sometimes has been mine,” Ms. Jong wrote in “Fear of Fifty.” “If she has to put up with a writer-mother, she’ll take her revenge with words.”
“How to Lose Your Mother” reads like a score-settling marathon at times, but also like a loving elegy. Ms. Jong-Fast mourns the years she spent as a child pining for a mother she felt was absent, and the loss she’s experiencing now, as her mother disappears into the fog of dementia.
“She’s alive, but she’s really not in there,” Ms. Jong-Fast said. “We’ll never have that relationship that I so wanted.”
Longtime friends who stay in touch with Ms. Jong, including Susan Cheever, the singer-songwriter Judy Collins and the novelist Ken Follett, say her long-term memory seems intact, but she’s forgetful and disoriented at times. She sometimes doesn’t recognize old friends, or her grandchildren, said Ms. Jong-Fast, who has three children.
“At first Erica isn’t sure who I am, then after a few minutes she remembers, and for a while she seems like her old self,” said Mr. Follett, who has known Ms. Jong since 1980.
People close to Ms. Jong who have read “How to Lose Your Mother” said they expect she would have a complicated reaction to it.
“She would love it, but it would make her sad,” said Gerri Karetsky, a friend of Ms. Jong’s for more than 40 years. “We all want to be perfect mothers, and God knows Erica wanted to be a good mother.”
But Ms. Jong herself doesn’t seem the least bit surprised. She saw her daughter’s tell-all coming.
“I can’t wait for her to tell her side of the story, even though I know it won’t be soft on me,” Ms. Jong wrote some 30 years ago in “Fear of Fifty.” “It’s hers to tell, not mine.”
Alexandra Alter writes about books, publishing and the literary world for The Times.
The post The Devastating Book Erica Jong Always Knew Her Daughter Would Write appeared first on New York Times.
