How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir

“I am the only child of a once-famous woman. How famous she was in her heyday I would argue is actually kind of irrelevant. Fame, like alcoholism, rings a bell in you that can never be unrung. My mother was famous, and it changed the makeup of her cells like a smoker who gets lung cancer, or an addict who gets so hooked on heroin that she is never freed and has to go on methadone forever and ever—even after she’s forgotten what the high of heroin was.”

Jong-Fast uses a simile that compares fame to addiction, establishing the memoir’s central premise that celebrity fundamentally alters a person’s psychological and even physical being. The metaphor of fame as “ringing a bell that can never be unrung” suggests permanence and irreversibility, while the extended comparison to smoking, cancer, and heroin addiction emphasizes the destructive, progressive nature of celebrity’s impact. The medical imagery (“makeup of her cells,” “lung cancer”) transforms fame from an abstract concept into a literal disease that corrupts the body. This quote establishes the theme of The Corrosive Effects of Fame by presenting celebrity not as a glamorous achievement but as a form of permanent contamination that fundamentally changes who someone becomes.

“To say my mother and I are close doesn’t really express the full magnitude of the relationship. We are painfully, inexorably, chronically close, the way magnets are. Sometimes when I lie in bed at night, staring at the ceiling, I’m not even sure I exist without her. She created me and I enabled her. But there is a paradox at the heart of our relationship. As close as we were—are—there has always been, between us, an unbridgeable distance. My relationship with her has always been wildly conflicted. I know that she loved me. But I also know that she never really seemed particularly interested in me. She always told me she wanted me, desperately wanted me. But I spent most of my school breaks in a trailer park in Tampa with my nanny.”

Jong-Fast uses the metaphor of magnets to illustrate the contradictory nature of her relationship with her mother—simultaneously drawn together yet unable to truly connect. The author creates tension through the juxtaposition of extreme closeness (“I’m not even sure I exist without her”) with emotional distance (“unbridgeable distance”), revealing how physical proximity can coexist with psychological isolation.