How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir

Throughout How to Lose Your Mother, escapism, delusion, and dissociation emerge as destructive forces that permeate multiple generations of Jong-Fast’s family, serving as both survival mechanisms and barriers to authentic human connection. Jong-Fast demonstrates how these psychological defense mechanisms, while initially protective, ultimately prevent genuine intimacy and perpetuate cycles of emotional abandonment that span from her grandfather Howard Fast through her mother Erica Jong, and into her own experience seeking connection with an emotionally unavailable parent.

Within the narrative, Erica Jong’s habitual dissociation represents a fundamental inability to remain present in difficult or uncomfortable situations, particularly those involving genuine emotional intimacy with her daughter. Jong-Fast observes that “dissociation has always been her magic trick. Her way of remaining in the world, but also not” (8), revealing that her mother used detachment to avoid the demands of authentic relationships while maintaining the appearance of engagement. This pattern manifested consistently throughout Jong-Fast’s childhood, when her mother would be physically present but emotionally absent, responding to questions with stock answers that suggested she was following a script rather than engaging with her daughter’s actual needs. The author’s childhood experience of looking into her mother’s “very glassy blue eyes” and wondering “if she saw me at all” illustrates the profound isolation created by this dissociative behavior (7), as Jong-Fast struggled to connect with a parent who mastered the art of being simultaneously present and absent.