That year is 2023. The pandemic is barely in the rearview mirror. Jong-Fast’s mother, Erica Jong, the famed author of the sexually explicit 1973 blockbuster “Fear of Flying,” has dementia and needs to be put in an assisted-living facility along with her husband, who has Parkinson’s; Jong-Fast’s beloved father-in-law will die, her godmother will get mortally sick, an aunt will die, her stepfather will die, and her husband will be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
Jong-Fast, a novelist, journalist and political commentator, examines this “annus horribilis” with exacting detail, unflinching honesty and raw emotion, managing to leaven the pain with self-deprecating humor and a mighty reservoir of love. Her prose is direct, simple and filled with bits of wisdom, plus asides to the reader, all of which creates an experience of intimacy with an adored friend. Her desire with this book is to help: “I wrote the book to help people (you have to say that, but it’s actually true), but I hoped the act of writing would make me less insane.”
Jong-Fast is the only child of Erica Jong and Jonathan Fast, a writer and son of Howard Fast (author of the best-selling novel “Spartacus,” which was turned into a movie by Stanley Kubrick). Molly was born in 1978. By 1982 her parents were divorced, leaving her to be raised essentially by a nanny.
Her mother showered Jong-Fast with words of love, telling her she was brilliant and a genius. She took her on shopping sprees at Bergdorf Goodman, where they would spend well beyond their means, hiding the purchases from Jong’s husband. By 19, Jong-Fast was in rehab for alcohol and drug abuse.
Getting sober allowed her to find equilibrium. Jong-Fast grew up, got married, had three children, became celebrated in her own right. Time passed. The “virus of fame” that had supercharged her mother’s life passed, leaving her diminished. “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,” Jong-Fast writes. Her mother drank and avoided dealing with reality —
always a struggle for her, even in better days — living with her husband and two dogs in their apartment, smelling of urine, dressed in a robe that would flop open to expose her naked body.
Jong-Fast didn’t want to write this stuff, and she doesn’t want you to hate her mom or anyone else in the story. But, she says, looking back helped give her perspective on the present, on the agony of putting her mother, now 83, in a memory-care facility, along with her stepfather. “Basically, the whole thing was reverse summer-camp drop off. You lied to your parents just like you lied to your kids. But with the kids, you knew that they were going for a short period of time. With the parents, they were going forever.” Jong-Fast was wracked with guilt, second-guessing the horror of her responsibility. “Her archive was at Columbia, but the rest of the contents of her life were handed to Housing Works,” she writes. “We weren’t taking apart an apartment: we were disassembling the great Erica Jong. We were dismantling her.”
Her mother showered Jong-Fast with words of love, telling her she was brilliant and a genius. She took her on shopping sprees at Bergdorf Goodman, where they would spend well beyond their means, hiding the purchases from Jong’s husband. By 19, Jong-Fast was in rehab for alcohol and drug abuse.
Getting sober allowed her to find equilibrium. Jong-Fast grew up, got married, had three children, became celebrated in her own right. Time passed. The “virus of fame” that had supercharged her mother’s life passed, leaving her diminished. “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,” Jong-Fast writes. Her mother drank and avoided dealing with reality —
always a struggle for her, even in better days — living with her husband and two dogs in their apartment, smelling of urine, dressed in a robe that would flop open to expose her naked body.
Jong-Fast didn’t want to write this stuff, and she doesn’t want you to hate her mom or anyone else in the story. But, she says, looking back helped give her perspective on the present, on the agony of putting her mother, now 83, in a memory-care facility, along with her stepfather. “Basically, the whole thing was reverse summer-camp drop off. You lied to your parents just like you lied to your kids. But with the kids, you knew that they were going for a short period of time. With the parents, they were going forever.” Jong-Fast was wracked with guilt, second-guessing the horror of her responsibility. “Her archive was at Columbia, but the rest of the contents of her life were handed to Housing Works,” she writes. “We weren’t taking apart an apartment: we were disassembling the great Erica Jong. We were dismantling her.”
While all this was going on, Jong-Fast’s husband was being treated for cancer. He had what his doctor called the “good” kind of pancreatic cancer, but that still involved surgeries and complications and an abundance of uncertainty. Jong-Fast powered through, continuing to juggle work obligations, the demands of caring for her children and the seemingly endless reckoning with her mother.
At some point, we all transition from one stage of adulthood to another, the one in which the child becomes the parent. Finding ourselves here, with the sick and dying now our responsibility, we struggle to let go of what could have been, of what hasn’t been said, as we find the care facility, sell the home, face the devastation of caring for the parent who didn’t properly care for us. Sure, the details are different — but the emotions are the same, and they make this book universal and affecting while (yes) helping assuage the familiar torment.
“How to Lose your Mother” is a midlife coming-of-age story in the extreme. Jong-Fast has put to words the tumult of the worst year of her life, captured and harnessed the experience so the rest of us can know that we are not alone. She’s Job with a sense of humor. With a nod to an earlier title by her mother, “How to Lose Your Mother” establishes its comic premise (a “how to” about losing one’s mother?). But with propulsive humor and perspective on her annus horribilis, Jong-Fast achieves the memoir’s transformative work of alchemy, arming us all with lines so good you won’t just want to underline them, you will want to cut them out to share.
Martha McPhee is the author of five novels and the memoir “Omega Farm.”
How to Lose Your Mother
A Daughter’s Memoir
By Molly Jong-Fast.
Viking. 256 pp. $
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