How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir

Erica Jong is an American novelist, satirist, and poet. Jong achieved significant literary fame with Fear of Flying, published in 1973, which became controversial for its attitudes towards female sexuality and figured prominently in the development of second-wave feminism. In How to Lose Your Mother, Jong-Fast presents her mother as a figure of literary celebrity whose identity became inseparable from her public persona, creating profound difficulties in their mother-daughter relationship.

Jong-Fast depicts her mother as someone who never recovered from the eventual loss of celebrity status that accompanied her groundbreaking literary success. The memoir presents Erica as becoming trapped in cycles of seeking to reclaim her former prominence, unable to adjust to the transition from cultural icon to ordinary person. Jong-Fast describes her mother’s obsession with fame as fundamentally destructive to her capacity for genuine relationships.

Throughout How to Lose Your Mother, Jong-Fast portrays Erica as physically present but emotionally unavailable, despite constantly professing her love. The memoir reveals that her mother’s literary obligations and social commitments frequently took precedence over parenting responsibilities, leaving young Molly primarily in the care of her nanny Margaret. Jong-Fast describes how her mother was swept away by literary events and public appearances, creating a pattern of abandonment that profoundly shaped her daughter’s sense of security.

Jong-Fast also presents her mother as someone who weaponized emotional manipulation, identifying people’s vulnerabilities and exploiting them during conflicts—a behavior pattern she attributes to Jong’s own childhood trauma from her mother Eda, who had an alcohol addiction. This multigenerational dysfunction created an environment of instability and mistrust that Jong-Fast traces through her family history.

The memoir extensively chronicles Erica’s lifelong alcohol addiction and prescription drug misuse, particularly diet pills. Jong-Fast describes dangerous incidents from her childhood, including her mother driving while intoxicated and causing accidents, which made young Molly realize her mother posed a genuine threat to others. Despite numerous interventions, including sessions with therapists who encouraged Jong-Fast as a child to confront her mother about drug use, Jong consistently failed to maintain sobriety. Jong-Fast contrasts her own successful recovery—she achieved sobriety at age 19 and has maintained it for over 25 years—with her mother’s pattern of failed sobriety attempts. The memoir presents Jong’s excuse that she was too famous to be sober as emblematic of her inability to prioritize her daughter’s welfare over her public image.

How to Lose Your Mother also reveals Jong’s willingness to exploit personal family situations for commercial purposes. Jong-Fast describes how her mother published a children’s book about Molly’s experience with her parents’ divorce, complete with inappropriate content, which was even adapted into a television pilot. This pattern extended to Jong’s fiction, and Jong-Fast notes that “everyone ended up in her novels” (65), including traumatic events from her daughter’s life. The memoir also recounts Jong’s fictionalization of Jong-Fast’s near-death experience during childbirth in her novel Fear of Dying, portraying the daughter character as exaggerating or imagining the severity of her medical crisis. Jong-Fast presents this as another example of her mother’s inability to acknowledge her daughter’s genuine experiences or separate her maternal responsibilities from her literary ambitions.

After her first two marriages ended in divorce, Jong married novelist and educator Jonathan Fast, son of novelist Howard Fast, in 1977. Jong-Fast’s memoir chronicles her parents’ troubled marriage and subsequent divorce, which established the unstable foundation of her childhood. The text describes the couple’s initial embrace of a 1970s bohemian lifestyle before relocating from California to Connecticut, and how the marriage deteriorated due to infidelity and jealousy, particularly surrounding Jong’s literary fame. The memoir also details Jong’s subsequent marriage to Ken, a lawyer who insisted on firing Margaret, representing another significant loss in Jong-Fast’s young life.

The central narrative of How to Lose Your Mother focuses on Jong’s cognitive decline due to dementia. The memoir presents this deterioration as the literal manifestation of Jong’s lifelong emotional dissociation—her ability to be present yet absent became a clinical reality. Jong-Fast describes finding her mother in increasingly deteriorated states that finally forced her to accept responsibility for her parents’ care. The memoir portrays Jong’s confusion and childlike behavior during medical appointments, her inability to process information, and her need for institutional care despite her lifelong resistance to acknowledging her limitations.

The memoir reveals Jong and her husband Ken’s financial irresponsibility despite appearing wealthy throughout Jong-Fast’s childhood, a financial crisis that forced Jong-Fast to confront her parents’ lifelong pattern of prioritizing immediate gratification over long-term planning. The memoir presents Jong’s inability to save money as another manifestation of her fundamental inability to consider the future or accept responsibility for her choices.

Jong-Fast presents her mother as someone whose public persona was her only identity, leaving no private version reserved for family. This complete fusion of public and private selves meant that Jong-Fast never had access to an authentic maternal relationship, only to a performance of motherhood filtered through Jong’s literary sensibility and public image.

Ken appears in Molly Jong-Fast’s memoir as her stepfather, a former divorce lawyer who became Erica Jong’s fourth husband. Jong-Fast presents Ken as a complex figure who represented both stability and disruption in her childhood, ultimately becoming a fellow victim of the progressive diseases that defined the memoir’s central crisis.

When her mother married Ken, he insisted on firing Margaret, Jong-Fast’s beloved nanny and primary caregiver, representing a profound loss in a childhood already marked by abandonment. Despite this initial disruption, Jong-Fast portrays Ken as someone who provided stability in their chaotic household, bringing practical skills and professional competence that contrasted with her mother’s artistic temperament.

Jong-Fast depicts Ken as someone who “became a lawyer because he liked to fight” (15). She says she spent many years “arguing with him about what reality was and what reality wasn’t” (15), but that he could also be very kind. Like Erica herself, Ken persistently denied the severity of her cognitive decline, attributing her confusion to hearing problems and suggesting she was merely preoccupied with writing. This denial forced Jong-Fast into the familiar role of pleading with adults to acknowledge her mother’s deteriorating condition, echoing her childhood experiences of trying to get recognition for her mother’s drinking problem.

The memoir chronicles Ken’s own decline from Parkinson’s disease alongside Erica Jong’s dementia. Jong-Fast reveals their financial irresponsibility, describing how they lived far beyond their means, but despite their limitations, Jong-Fast presents Ken as genuinely devoted to her mother throughout their marriage.

Ken’s death marked the end of her mother’s longest and most stable relationship. When signing his cremation release form, Jong-Fast identified herself as his “daughter” rather than “stepdaughter,” suggesting final acceptance of their relationship. Despite his flaws, Jong-Fast ultimately recognizes Ken as someone who loved her mother consistently, making his death another significant loss in a year defined by multiple family crises.