How to Lose Your Mother
A Daughter's Memoir
By Molly Jong-Fast
Category: Parenting | Reading Duration: 23 min
About the Book
How to Lose Your Mother (2025) explores the complex dynamics between a daughter and her famous writer mother, revealing how growing up with a fame-hungry parent can profoundly shape your life. As her mother’s dementia progresses, this brutally honest memoir transforms from a story of chaotic upbringing into a profound meditation on love, loss, and the precious nature of family bonds.
Who Should Read This?
- Children of high-achieving parents who can relate to growing up in the shadow of their parent’s career
- People interested in stories of messy, intense, complex family dynamics
- Anyone navigating a parent’s dementia or cognitive decline
What’s in it for me? A journey through the complex terrain of family, fame, and forgiveness.
Many of us grow up with parents who feel larger than life, but imagine if one of them was a global cultural icon. Molly Jong-Fast knows this peculiar burden intimately. She grew up as the daughter of Erica Jong – the feminist author who scandalized 1970s America with her audaciously explicit feminist novel Fear of Flying. Fame slipped into their home like smoke, touching everything, changing the texture of love itself.
This Blink follows the story of a daughter who spent decades in that famous shadow, only to find herself suddenly thrust into the role of caregiver when multiple crises collided. Through her eyes, we see how the threads of family pull tight during catastrophe, how old resentments dissolve when faced with mortality, and how strength emerges from unexpected places. If you’ve ever felt trapped by family expectations, struggled with addiction, or faced the overwhelming responsibility of caring for aging parents, this unflinching account will resonate deeply – and perhaps help you find your own path to acceptance. Let’s begin.
Chapter 1: The weight of literary genius
As kids, almost all of us dream of being famous: a popular singer, perhaps, or a revered movie star. But growing up as the child of someone already famous creates an entirely different reality. For the author, childhood meant learning that her mother existed in two versions: the private woman who lived in their apartment, and the public Erica Jong who belonged to millions of readers worldwide. Between these two versions lay a gulf that no amount of love could bridge.
That gulf had opened in 1973, when Erica Jong tasted something most writers only fantasize about: true cultural impact. Her 1973 novel Fear of Flying didn’t just sell millions of copies – it rewrote the conversation around female sexuality and desire. But fame, the author learned, operates like a powerful drug that permanently alters your brain chemistry. Once her mother experienced that intoxicating rush of widespread recognition, ordinary life became impossibly bland by comparison. This created a household where love coexisted alongside profound absence. The author’s childhood was a series of emotional riddles: a mother who proclaimed her daughter was everything to her, yet regularly sent her to spend entire school vacations with her nanny in a Tampa trailer park.
In other words, declarations of devotion were followed by long stretches of benign neglect. The author found herself orbiting someone who seemed perpetually distracted, feeling at once too close and too distant to this strange, irreverent, brilliant woman. The family tree was already heavy with the burden of fame. The author’s grandfather Howard Fast, author of the sweeping historical epic Spartacus, had also been seduced and ultimately abandoned by public adoration. Three generations learned the same bitter lesson: fame creates a hunger that can never truly be satisfied, leaving its victims forever chasing the high of former relevance. Years later, as the pandemic accelerated her mother’s descent into alcoholism and dementia, the author faced a last impossible riddle: How do you mourn the loss of a parent who was never really there to begin with?
Chapter 2: Two devastating diagnoses
Could you imagine what it’s like to have strangers approach you your entire life – yet they’re not here to tell you how great you are? They’re here to tell you how much they love your mother, how her groundbreaking novel changed their lives, how brave she was to write so candidly about female sexuality, and so on. For decades, Molly Jong-Fast served as a walking reminder of someone else’s fame. But suddenly, everything changed.
Strangers no longer approached her to praise her mother’s feminist legacy – instead, they whispered concerned questions about her increasingly erratic behavior. The shift was unmistakable and heartbreaking: people who once celebrated Jong’s boldness now felt embarrassed by her confusion. In one particularly jarring instance, Jong commented “neat” on someone’s Instagram post about their deceased father. When Erica Jong was 81, her neurologist Dr. Devi, confirmed what everyone could already see: Jong had dementia, possibly Alzheimer’s. Jong initially lied about the diagnosis, insisting the doctor had said she was fine.
The author’s stepfather Ken, himself battling early Parkinson’s, remained locked in protective denial. When the author finally learned of the diagnosis, she was already deep in the process of becoming a parent to her parents. Her relationship with her mother seemed more unfixable than ever. How could you reconcile with someone whose mind was beginning to slip? Just as the author was processing this loss, another catastrophe struck. Her husband Matt, only fifty-nine, received a devastating late-night call from the emergency room: doctors had found a mass on his pancreas.
Coming from a family decimated by cancer, the diagnosis felt like a death sentence. The author spent sleepless nights contemplating widowhood at forty-four, haunted by the smell of sickness that clung to her husband despite frequent showers. As she processed her crisis through writing, the author realized she had become exactly what she always resented – someone who transforms personal tragedy into material. The tables had turned: the daughter who grew up as her mother’s unwilling subject matter was now the one wielding the pen.
Chapter 3: The lives and loves of Erica Jong
As her mother’s dementia progressed, the author began to reflect more and more on her childhood. Her parents met through her grandfather, Communist writer Howard Fast. He had invited Erica Jong to one of his legendary parties. When her chauffeur failed to show up, he sent his son Jonathan to pick her up in his green MG.
After that, everything moved very quickly. Erica Jong jetted over to the Dominican Republic to divorce her second husband. Shortly after, she and Jonathan were married. The family initially settled in bohemian 1970s Malibu, living in a shack between rock musicians and writer Henry Miller. But concerned that West Coast living would corrupt their future child, they eventually relocated to a Connecticut house constructed from old barns. Amidst this idyllic backdrop, the author’s parents indulged in organic food, marijuana, and mutual irritation.
In 1978, their daughter Molly was born – her red hair proof to her mother that she was very special. Yet the author entered a household already destabilizing under competing literary egos and her mother’s infidelities. The epic divorce that followed left both parents fleeing the family home, abandoning the author with her nanny Margaret for an entire year. Finally, she moved with her mother into a haunted Manhattan townhouse painted bubblegum pink. Frequent break-ins and jarring encounters with her mother’s stalker triggered Molly’s developing OCD. Most painfully, her severe dyslexia rendered her an outsider in her own family of celebrated writers.
Despite an endless procession of tutors, she struggled desperately with letters that refused to form coherent meaning. Her mother’s romantic life became a revolving door of potential stepfathers – wine merchants, architects, magazine editors – each representing a different possible future before inevitably becoming material for future novels. After a brief ninety-day courtship, her mother eventually decided to marry a man named Ken. Although Ken showed little interest in serving as a parental figure to Molly, her mother promptly fired her beloved nanny Margaret – whom Molly considered her true maternal figure. The transition to Ken’s sterile white brick apartment building completed their transformation from bohemian chaos to bourgeois respectability. There was only one thing missing from their perfect little world – a sense of family.
Chapter 4: When it rains, it pours
We return to a time closer to the present, and the author is facing not one, but two life-altering crises: her mother is losing her mind while her husband is dying. Between doctor’s appointments and meetings with lawyers and estate agents, she barely has time to feel sorry for herself. In a rare moment of grace, one of her husband’s doctors delivers unexpected hope: surgery could “cure” Matt’s neuroendocrine pancreatic cancer. But the relief is brief – a little later, they find out that the so-called “good” cancer Matt has already spread to his lymph nodes.
This means a forty to fifty percent chance of recurrence. Suddenly, the couple’s existence becomes an endless series of percentage calculations on exactly how long he has left to live. At the same time, the author has to contend with her mother’s deepening dementia and physical decline. Erica Jong is swept up in delusions, grows increasingly incoherent and is refusing to bathe. Her husband Ken wears diapers, drools constantly, and believes he’s living in his childhood home in Great Neck. Yet both of them remain locked in denial about their conditions, convinced they will return to work soon.
The burden of caregiving falls entirely on the author, who finds herself having to search for the least expensive of all the astronomically expensive nursing homes. She becomes trapped in the role she had always dreaded – the responsible adult managing everyone else’s catastrophes while feeling barely able to hold herself together. Reflecting on her journey to sobriety at nineteen, the author recognizes the painful irony of her situation. She had gotten sober then because she realized no one was coming to rescue her. Later, she married Matt because he seemed too dependable to ever abandon her. But she had never factored in cancer or dementia.
The illusion of security crumbles completely when the author discovers that her parents have lived far beyond their means despite appearing wealthy throughout her childhood. The Concorde flights, five-star hotels, and luxury cars were financed by debt, leaving the author to sell her mother’s belongings and fire their longtime housekeeper Maria, who had been promised lifelong care. Even their supposedly valuable book collection proves largely worthless at auction. Meanwhile, Matt’s condition deteriorates – his PET scan shows the cancer had spread to his liver.
The doctors stop discussing a cure, and start speaking instead of palliative care. The author faces a crushing future: widowhood at forty-four while babying her parents until death. Matt’s treatment shows promising results – his medication is working, and the doctors have a new plan to attack the liver metastasis.
Chapter 5: Death, death, and more death
Yet this good news arrives alongside a devastating loss: Matt’s ninety-one-year-old father Stu dies after months in a coma, adding another layer of grief to an already unbearable year. Meanwhile, COVID’s lockdowns have permanently severed her mother and stepfather from reality. In many ways, they never emerge from quarantine, drinking and watching television until noon, forgetting about their personal hygiene, rambling incoherently. In a surreal moment that captures the protective power of her mother’s fame, the author accompanies her demented mother to speak at her Barnard reunion.
Despite Erica’s obvious cognitive decline, the audience applauds her empty platitudes – simply because she remains a recognizable celebrity. Her fame has created its own reality, a bubble she cannot comprehend leaving behind. But this surreal spectacle offers no shield from reality. The year of death continues its relentless march as Ken’s sister Patty dies, leaving him the sole survivor of his siblings. As visiting becomes an increasingly dreaded obligation, the author even finds herself unconsciously referring to her mother in past tense. For the author, the cumulative trauma manifests as severe depression.
She starts sleeping not from fatigue, but to escape consciousness. She stops eating entirely, ignoring concerned questions about her rapid weight-loss. Simple activities like answering the phone become impossibly difficult, as if normal life exists behind an impenetrable barrier. Seeking resolution, and simply a break from it all, Molly travels to Venice with her son.
As a child, she accompanied her mother on numerous trips to Italy, staying in crumbling, rat-infested houses while Erica conducted her affair with a married Italian man. For the author, these visits were marked by disturbing encounters, including a predatory family friend who repeatedly cornered and touched her while her alcoholic mother remained obliviously drunk. But once in Italy, the author quickly realizes she has become trapped in an endless cycle of reliving trauma. She fighting a war that’s already been lost – and that it’s time to stop fighting and move forward.
Chapter 6: Growing up at last
In early 2023, the author finally succeeded in moving her mother and Ken into an expensive nursing home in Manhattan. That same year, her mother’s masterpiece Fear of Flying celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. In a moment of cruel irony, the novel received major coverage in The New York Times Book Review – the literary recognition Erica Jong had craved her entire career. Yet by this point, she was already too far gone to comprehend the significance of this moment.
She couldn’t even remember writing the book that defined her legacy. As the author dismantled her childhood apartment, selling off her mother’s carefully curated book collection and designer clothes, she found herself literally deconstructing “the great Erica Jong. ” The process felt like an archaeological excavation of a life built on performance and pretense. Soon after moving to the nursing home, Ken’s physical state deteriorated to the point where he had to enter hospice care. His death came swiftly, forcing the author to confront her own failures as a stepdaughter. Delivering his eulogy, she finally recognized her stepfather’s fundamental kindness.
She realized her lifelong resentment had been misdirected – the problem in their relationship was not his inability to give love, but her inability to accept it. The year’s final twist was a happy one at last: Matt’s latest scans showed complete clearance – no evidence of metastatic spread anywhere in his body. After almost a year of living their lives ruled by cancer, the couple could return to the mundane irritations of normal marriage, arguing about untied shoelaces rather than survival percentages. And yet there was an added, new layer of seriousness to their relationship. The author realized they had crossed the irreversible threshold into true adulthood, becoming the generation responsible for managing decline and death. As her mother remained warehoused in expensive isolation, caught in a netherworld between life and death, the author reflected on her long year of crisis.
She finally realized that some wounds can only heal through acceptance rather than resolution. As she walked her aging dogs with Matt on a cold January night, she knew she was ready: ready to emerge from the wreckage of her upbringing, embrace her role as the “boring stable one” – and face whatever losses lay ahead. This Blink to How to Lose Your Mother by Molly Jong-Fast told the story of a family trapped by fame.
Final summary
Growing up as the daughter of Erica Jong, the author experienced a childhood marked by emotional neglect disguised as bohemian freedom. When her mother developed dementia and her husband faced cancer, she had to confront the harsh reality of becoming the family’s sole caregiver while processing decades of unresolved trauma. In her mother, fame created an insatiable hunger that drew her away from her own daughter. Yet through caring for her mother during her cognitive decline, the author realized that her childhood wounds would heal only through acceptance rather than resolution.
Her journey from resentful daughter to reluctant caregiver ultimately becomes a story about embracing adulthood’s responsibilities and finding peace with imperfect love. Okay, that’s it for this Blink. We hope you enjoyed it. If you can, please take the time to leave us a rating – we always appreciate your feedback. See you in the next Blink.
About the Author
Molly Jong-Fast is an American writer, journalist, and political commentator. She’s the daughter of acclaimed novelist Erica Jong and granddaughter of writer Howard Fast. Her own writing appears regularly in the Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and MSNBC. She also hosts the podcasts The New Abnormal and Fast Politics. Her other books include Normal Girl and The Social Climber’s Handbook.