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In Her New Memoir, ‘How to Lose Your Mother,' Molly Jong-Fast Charts a Bold New Path By Examining Old Family Ties
Yet the real heart of Jong-Fast's new memoir, How to Lose Your Mother (out June 3 from Viking), is her attempt to come to terms with the now-83-year-old Jong's dementia. She was diagnosed in 2023—the same year that Jong-Fast's husband learned he had a rare cancer—and she moved to a Manhattan nursing home earlier this year. 'The tragedy: now I could get her attention, but of course now I didn't want it,' Jong-Fast writes.
Yet she resists the temptation to tie either of her family members' medical crises up with a bow, freely admitting that she's still working to define and understand her relationship with her mother, even as she becomes a caretaker for the woman who never quite managed to care for her in the ways she needed. Through all the chaos that Jong's past choices and current illness have unleashed on her life, Jong-Fast remains staunchly committed to the project being her own person: 'I am sober and sort of sane and not my mother,' she writes—words that feel almost like a guiding mantra for the book.
Here, Jong-Fast speaks to Vogue about the baby-of-boomer blues, what she learned from her mother, and how she'd feel about being the subject of her own child's work.
Vogue: Do you have any favorite parent-child narratives that helped prepare you to tell this story?
Molly Jong-Fast: Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking is a great example of how to write about a really bad year in a way that other people can connect with and that can serve as a template for the experience. That was certainly a model. Because I come from the novelistic tradition, I've always sort of connected with prose in a way that I think a lot of political writers aren't as interested in, because it's just sort of a different way of looking at writing. That was a book that I was very much struck by, but there's also Girl, Interrupted and so many others; memoir is an amazing genre that lends itself to every machination of telling your story in a weird, feminist way.
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3 hours ago
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Before you buy stock in CRISPR Therapeutics, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and CRISPR Therapeutics wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $668,155!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $1,106,071!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 1,070% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 184% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor. See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of August 13, 2025 Prosper Junior Bakiny has positions in Vertex Pharmaceuticals. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends CRISPR Therapeutics and Vertex Pharmaceuticals. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Here's How This Forgotten Healthcare Stock Could Generate Life-Changing Returns was originally published by The Motley Fool
