Molly Jong-Fast Reflects on Her Mother’s Dementia and the Fleeting Nature of Fame

My mother coined an expression for casual sex: the “zipless fuck.” Now think about being the offspring of the person who wrote that phrase. And pour one out for me.

I grew up with Erica Jong everywhere—on television, in the crossword puzzle, in the newspaper. She was a kind of second-wave feminist, a white feminist, and (a highly educated, wildly affluent, Jewish, and somewhat out-of-touch) Everywoman. But she wasn’t an actual Everywoman, of course; she was too famous for that. Too famous, and too special. She was famous for her book Fear of Flying, and then later she was famous for being famous, and then eventually she wasn’t famous anymore. Because fame, like youth, is fleeting; it deserts you when you least expect it. The wheel of fortune is always spinning.

My mother never got over being famous. Even years after people stopped coming up to us in stores, even years after she slipped from the public consciousness, the virus of fame had made her someone different. Becoming normal like the rest of us, the journey to unfamousness, was for her an event so strange and stressful, so damaging to her ego, that she was never able to process it.

I’ve always floated around like some kind of Erica Jong Rorschach test. I am a repository for people’s feelings about my mother, about feminism, about the sexual revolution.

My grandfather, the writer (and Communist) Howard Fast—his most famous novel was Spartacus, adapted into an even more famous movie directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring my grandfather’s nemesis Kirk Douglas—had the curse too: He was unable to become unfamous, to slip back into the world the rest of us occupy, the world of emptying the dishwasher and picking up your prescriptions, and the world of not having people stop you on the street to tell you every detail of their lives. My grandfather was a best-selling author who published more than 80 books, but now no one—other than a very narrow subset of the elderly—has heard of him. I never knew my mother or grandfather in the height of their respective fames, but I did know them at the end, when they were desperately trying to claw fame back from the writers who, they believed, had taken it from them. Watching my mother’s failed metamorphosis back to normal made me a sort of fame hobbyist, like a bird-watcher without the birds.

For the addictive personality, the junkie itch from coming off celebrity can never ever be cured, not with all the adoration in the world. Mom was never a normal person again. My stepfather, Ken, tried to keep her in the style to which she was accustomed, tried to treat her like a queen. Maybe it worked? I don’t know. I never knew her when she was unfamous. She would always say that I was everything to her. She would always tell anyone who listened that I was her greatest accomplishment in life. I always knew that wasn’t the truth.

I wondered if other people had the same connection issue with her that I did. I found her distracted and disinterested. Impossible to connect with. I always just assumed this was some personal failing on my part, just assumed the problem was me, but maybe other people felt the same way—they also assumed they were the problem. It would have been helpful to have a sibling to commiserate with, but I was my mother’s only child. Everyone told me she loved me so much, but I never felt all that loved. Later on, I realized that I never felt that anyone loved me.

‘How to Lose Your Mother’ by Molly Jong-Fast

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For my entire life, random people have come over to “talk” to me about my mom. They wanted me to know how much they loved Fear of Flying. They wanted me to know how important her work was to them. They wanted to t alk about her fame, about her inflammatory comments about sex. Sometimes they’d tell me some embarrassing thing she’d said about me on television. Sometimes they’d tell me about some embarrassing thing she’d written about me.

But, starting four years ago, when I was writing for The Daily Beast and obsessed with tweeting, things started to change. People were no longer coming up to me to tell me they had seen her on Charlie Rose or Good Morning America. (And Charlie Rose didn’t have a show anymore; he’d been canceled.) Now people were coming up to me for a different reason, for one of those hard conversations. They would seem almost apologetic.

They would pause before they spoke, their voices heavy with a kind of shame, a deep kind of embarrassment. It’s always been hard for me not to find the discomfort of others deeply unpleasant. I’d encourage them to say whatever it was they wanted to—but did I want to hear it?

Their voices would inevitably be hushed and perhaps a bit halting. Sometimes the person would take my hand.

“How is your mother?” they would ask.

And then they would offer up one of the following comments:

“Is your mom…okay?”

“Are you sure she’s okay?”

“She seems off.”

“She can’t remember anything.”

“There’s something really wrong with her.”

Everywhere I went in my little neighborhood, I found myself surrounded by people who wanted to talk to me about my mother’s failing memory and her increasingly erratic behavior: at the bookstore, at the hair salon, on the corner. Everywhere I went, my mother’s condition followed me.

I went to a British restaurant for dinner with my husband and a famous poet—which is kind of an oxymoron, I know—and the poet’s wife, a novelist. At the end of the dinner, the wife told me she had something to say that might upset me.

“No, it’s okay,” I said.

Was it okay? Who knows. I’ve always floated around like some kind of Erica Jong Rorschach test. I am a repository for people’s feelings about my mother, about feminism, about the sexual revolution.

And then, of course, there is the little issue that my mother has never had a filter. She’d always say the worst possible thing. That was one of her trademarks. Sometimes when I’d be sitting at a dinner, or watching her give a talk, a thought would pop into my mind: What is the worst possible thing she could say? And without fail, she’d say it. I remember watching in horror as someone live-tweeted her appearance at a book festival. I couldn’t control what she said or what people thought about her, but at least I could control one thing: When I was young, I decided not to read her books.

I braced myself for whatever the poet’s wife was going to say.

She explained that she had posted a photograph of her deceased father on Instagram. She picked up her phone to show me the post. I considered the picture of the woman’s father. He looked like all deceased fathers: old.

“Your mother posted a comment on the photo,” she said.

“Okay.”

I was so past feeling embarrassed by things my mother said and did. I lived in this kind of perpetual post-embarrassment state. I could take this.

“The comment your mother wrote was ‘Neat.’ ”

The woman looked as if she were going to cry.

I thought about my mother commenting on a picture of someone’s dead father with the word neat. And then it became difficult for me to think about much of anything else.

I called my stepfather. He had been a divorce lawyer. He was always ready to have a disagreement—not a fight exactly, but a sort of conflict, the kind I always hated.

“Hi, Ken,” I said.

“Moll,” he replied.

He always called me Moll.

“We have to talk about Mom.”

He laughed. It was a pained laugh, an uncomfortable laugh.

“Mom is acting strangely,” I said.

Ken cleared his throat.

“Mom is losing her memory,” I said.

I could hear my mother’s two poodles barking in their apartment. I’ve known Ken since I was 11 years old. I knew the throat clearing meant that he was getting prepared to lecture me about the thing everyone was telling me was true. Ken was one of those people who became a lawyer because he liked to fight, and he fought with anyone he could find. One of my more crushing childhood memories occurred when he yelled at a waiter because the restaurant didn’t have his preferred mustard brand. He gave the waiter a 20 to go to the nearest deli and buy his stupid mustard. The waiter actually did it. That’s how terrifying Ken was, but he could also be very kind. He often did my friends’ divorces and undercharged them, or didn’t charge them at all. He was never cruel to me. I did, however, feel that he believed he was put on this earth to protect my mother from me.

“Look, Moll, this is a hearing problem,” Ken said. I had spent so many years arguing with him about what reality was and what reality wasn’t, and each time he would tell me my reality was wrong and his was right. I hated arguing. I hated it. “She just needs hearing aids.”

“Ken,” I said. “This has nothing to do with hearing. She has dementia.”

“Ah, Moll,” he said. “You know she’s just thinking of her next book.”

But Mom hadn’t written a book in a long time. The last thing she’d published was a book of poetry with a publisher that seemed like a vanity press. They had asked her for a donation. I’m not an economist or anything, but I think the publisher is supposed to pay the author.

And suddenly I was 13 again, begging my stepfather to get my mother to stop taking diet pills, or to have her slow down on the drinking. Everyone told me I was crazy in that case too. They would tell me that my mom didn’t drink too much; she was just tired. She was just passed out on the bed, eye makeup smeared all over her face, lipstick everywhere.

She was just working on another book. She was just under a lot of pressure. Ken would inevitably declare, “Once she gets her book done, then she’ll be back to normal.” Thirty years later, and I was having the exact same conversation with him. But this time, at 44, I finally knew my reality was right and his was wrong.

There was no book. There would never be another book. Her Last Tycoon, her swan song, was to be an autobiography called Selfie. She had gotten the idea that Selfie was a good title because, at a memorial service for a friend, she had run into David Remnick, the editor in chief of The New Yorker. She had told Remnick the title, and she had decided he had liked it. It was not completely clear if this had actually happened, or happened in the way my mom was reporting it, but it didn’t matter. That was her version of the story. It was always her version of the story.

“I think she’s fine,” Ken said calmly.

One of the interesting things was that you could say anything to my mom and stepdad, like anything, and they wouldn’t get mad at you. Ken did love fighting, but part of the reason he loved it was because he never got really angry.

I told him that this was bordering on insane. I told him that everyone could see what was happening here.

“She wrote ‘neat’ on someone’s Instagram post about her dead father. Like, ‘Gee whiz, that’s so neat that your father died.’ ”

“Eh,” Ken said.

That was one of the many baffling things about both of them—when presented with evidence that perhaps they were wrong, they would just ignore the evidence and continue on their merry way. This habit of theirs always made me feel insane.

Ken was starting to display early symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. He was in denial about that too. One big difference between Mom and Ken: When Ken started losing his mind, he knew it. About 10 years ago, he had told us. He wanted us to know because he had a job, which was nominally still being a lawyer but was really taking care of my mother. He was in his 70s when he started forgetting. Found himself to be less sharp. He started going to doctors. Doctors told him he was fine, but he knew. Soon after, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Then he sort of forgot about the anxiety that he was losing his mind and devoted himself to ignoring his Parkinson’s.

This tactic was a stark contrast to my mom, who was now unable to remember if she’d fed the dogs or if she’d had a phone call. Everyone who talked to Mom knew that there was something deeply wrong with her. I don’t know how many people suspected dementia. Given her dreamy nature, she had never seemed sharp per se, but—slowly, and then all of a sudden—she seemed completely lost. When confronted with this obvious fact, she would cover herself. She had many strategies. I’d misheard her; I had misunderstood her. She’d repeat a story she’d told me five minutes before, and I’d say, “You already told me this, Mom.” Her response might be a defensive “I know”—as if the problem were mine for not appreciating that this story was important enough for her to keep repeating. Or she might try to change the subject by distracting me. Or she might just space out. She had a whole bag of tricks.

I texted my cousin Harold, who’s a doctor. I wanted to know what the symptoms of dementia were. He texted back:

Repetitive questions of things discussed and answered

Short term memory loss

Lack any deep thought and therefore quality of conversations diminished

Facts that were shared on events etc became forgotten

Well, there you go. Check, check, check, check. Confirmed.

One evening a couple of months later, I understood that her awareness of her condition had changed. She was sitting at the dining room table, drinking coffee and reading the paper, when I came in the room.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hi, darling.”

She got up. Her silk robe was open and you could see her naked body. (She was never good at keeping her robe closed—this was true both metaphorically and literally.) She hugged me, she kissed me, she told me she loved me in an effusive way that was clearly not the way her own cold, mean mom did it.

We sat down at the dining room table. I tried not to look at her boob, which was unfortunately somewhat visible. I spent way too much time thinking about getting older and about how ruthless the march of time was on the body.

I asked her if she wanted a cappuccino. She said she was okay.

“Mom, guess what?” I asked. “I saw your friend Judy at an event.”

I’d just run into her old pal, the folk singer Judy Collins. Judy looked great—very thin and elegant, and dressed all in black. She smelled great too. Judy asked me how my mom was, because everyone always asked me how my mom was. I did not want to lie to Judy about my mother’s increasingly demented condition, so I just made a face and said, “Meh.”

“Who?” Mom asked.

“Your friend Judy. The singer.”

There was a faraway look in her eyes.

“Judy,” she said. “Judy?”

I reminded her that she made Judy sing the Joni Mitchell song “Both Sides, Now” at my wedding. (Collins had a hit with it in 1968.)

“Judy!” Mom declared. “Of course.”

But I could tell she was lying. She had no clue who Judy was. Her voice always changed when she lied, became just the slightest bit more tentative.

And then she said, “I don’t remember who that is.”

That was the moment I realized she knew she couldn’t cover anymore. She still wouldn’t admit that she had dementia, but she would now occasionally admit that her memory wasn’t what it used to be.

And then she kept slipping away—less and less of her in my life, less and less of her on the page, less and less of her. Soon she would be just a faint fragment of a once-great woman. She had been a force, a powerhouse, and now she was becoming an echo.

But it’s very important for you to understand that Mom is one of those people who is constitutionally incapable of being honest. (She’s been in denial about her drinking since I was born, for example.) Mom couldn’t accept that she had dementia until she was so far gone it was no longer a question. But even then, she remained not convinced. Neither did Ken.

“Well, we just don’t agree,” Ken told me on the phone.

“I’m taking her to the dementia doctor,” I said.

My mother is just a body now. She has dementia. She has breath and hair and pretty blue eyes, but Erica Jong the person has left the planet.

My grandmother, my mother’s mother, also had dementia and died at the exceptionally advanced age of a hundred-plus, running through her money with a nurse she thought was some kind of family member or friend. But that nurse had her own family.

I wasn’t good about visiting Grandma. I was one of nine grandchildren, and I used that as an excuse—diffusing the responsibility—but the truth was I just hated the idea of my grandma sitting in that bed, in a state between living and dead. Or maybe I was just a bad, selfish person? Or maybe I just didn’t like old people, the reminder that death was around the corner, inching toward us. Grandma died, then Mom will die, and then I will. That’s the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is that these things are out of order.

Like my grandmother, my mother will likely continue on for the next 25 years in a state of dreamy, distracted unreality. She will become increasingly unreachable. I recently gave an interview to NPR about my mother. The interviewer and I spoke in that weird, slightly halting NPR way. I kept flipping from the present to the past tense: “She was”; “she is.”

I couldn’t quite agree with myself about if she was still on this planet or already gone. I was a bad daughter. I am a bad daughter.

The horrible irony is that she has always seemed a bit demented. Maybe not demented, exactly, but distracted: dreamy, head in the clouds, and detached. When I was a little red-haired girl—like Little Orphan Annie, but fat—I would yell at my mother for “spacing out.” I used to beg her to focus, to pay attention to me. “Where did you go?” I’d ask her as she stared into space. My mother has these very glassy blue eyes. I would look into them and wonder if she saw me at all.

Sometimes I’d wonder if I was real. Years later I would interview a journalist about Elon Musk, and the journalist would tell me that there was evidence to support the supposition that Musk believed he was in a simulation. The journalist continued, “A lot of rich and famous people believe that the world is a simulation for their benefit, because otherwise how could things have worked out so well for them?” I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea, that the entire world is just a simulation for your benefit.

Eventually Mom would answer, but never the question I asked. She always seemed to have a sort of stock answer for even my stupidest, simplest questions, as if she were following her own script. She was always performing. Her father was a performer too—a drummer in the Catskills before he became an importer, before he started his company, the Seymour Mann Connoisseur Collection, and sold his collectible dolls on QVC. (About him, my mother said in an interview with Charlie Rose, “He had put all of his vaudeville ambitions into me.”) She would run her fingers through my hair and ask me if I knew how much she loved me. Did I know how much she loved me? Did I know how brilliant I was? How talented?

I wish I’d asked her why, if she loved me so much, she didn’t ever want to spend time with me, but there was no way she’d have ever given me a straight answer. And besides, in her view, she did spend time with me—in her head, in her writing, in the world she inhabited. I was there. I may have felt that she was slightly allergic to me, but to her, she was spending time with the most important version of me. Disassociation has always been her magic trick, her way of remaining in the world but also not. Was it her chronic dreaminess that made it impossible to tell if she was merely distracted, or if she was disappearing?

From How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir, by Molly Jong-Fast, to be published on June 3 by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House. Copyright © 2025 by Molly Jong-Fast.

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