60 pages • 2-hour read
How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir
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Index of Terms
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness, mental illness, addiction, and death.
Dementia
The term “dementia” refers to a general collection of symptoms, including language difficulties and loss of memory, problem-solving, and thinking abilities, rather than a specific illness or disorder. Psychological changes, including anxiety, depression, and paranoia, can occur along with these cognitive changes. Jong-Fast describes dementia through the symptoms she observed in her mother: repetitive questions, short-term memory loss, diminished conversation quality, and the forgetting of significant people and events from her mother’s past. Dementia fuels the progressive cognitive decline that ultimately claimed Erica Jong’s mental faculties and serves as the central crisis driving the memoir’s narrative.
The condition becomes a metaphor for the broader pattern of loss and absence that has characterized Jong-Fast’s relationship with her mother throughout her life. Unlike other forms of decline, dementia forces a confrontation with reality that even Erica’s typical denial cannot fully overcome, though she and her husband Ken attempted to minimize its significance. In the context of this memoir, dementia represents not just cognitive decline but the final barrier to the authentic mother-daughter relationship that Jong-Fast has always yearned for, making it both a literal medical condition and a symbol of irretrievable loss.
Dissociation
In How to Lose Your Mother, dissociation refers to Erica Jong’s psychological defense mechanism of mentally removing herself from present reality while maintaining physical presence, a response to stress rooted in trauma. Jong-Fast describes this as her mother’s “magic trick” that allowed her to remain “in the world but also not” (8), creating a chronic state of emotional unavailability that made genuine connection impossible. In Erica, this dissociative behavior manifested as chronic dreaminess, distraction, and an inability to focus on her daughter’s needs, leaving Jong-Fast constantly wondering whether her mother was merely distracted or actively disappearing. The author presents dissociation as both a survival strategy that helped Erica cope with the pressures of fame and a destructive pattern that prevented authentic relationships. When she developed dementia, her dissociation became literal and permanent, representing the ultimate manifestation of a lifelong tendency to escape from emotional engagement.
Dyslexia
Jong-Fast has dyslexia, a learning disorder that affects a person’s ability to read, write, and spell. This condition made reading and academic success extremely difficult throughout her childhood. The condition created a profound sense of shame and inadequacy for Jong-Fast, who struggled to decode letters and words despite coming from a family of accomplished writers. Her dyslexia led to her dismissal from the prestigious Dalton School in third grade, which deeply affected her sense of family legacy.
In the context of the narrative, Jong Fast’s dyslexia acts as a metaphor for her perceived inability to live up to her family’s literary expectations and her mother’s fantasies about her specialness. Despite her academic struggles, her mother continued to insist that Jong-Fast was a genius whose unconventional brilliance was simply misunderstood by ordinary educational institutions, demonstrating the complex ways parents can both support and burden their children with unrealistic expectations.
Second-Wave Feminism
Second-wave feminism is the cultural movement of the 1960s and 1970s that Erica Jong both embodied and complicated through her literary work. While earlier women’s movements focused on legal and civil rights, second-wave feminism focused on their rejection of the traditional gendered roles women were forced to inhabit. The movement explored social justice and sexual liberation, promoting a woman’s right to question the traditional status quo through the idea that women could “have it all” and find success and fulfillment in both their personal and professional lives simultaneously.
Jong-Fast describes her mother as a “second-wave feminist” whose novel Fear of Flying became a landmark of feminist literature by candidly depicting women’s sexual desires in ways that shocked contemporary readers. However, the author suggests that Jong’s version of feminism was limited by her privileged position as a “highly educated, wildly affluent Jewish” woman who was somewhat disconnected from the experiences of ordinary women (3). Jong-Fast implies that her mother’s feminist identity was performative rather than deeply felt, serving more as a public persona than a genuine commitment to women’s liberation. The author presents second-wave feminism as both empowering women to speak openly about sexuality and desire while potentially creating new forms of performance and artifice for women like her mother, who became famous for her feminist writings.
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