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Scroll.in
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
‘How to Lose Your Mother': Molly Jong-Fast's sizzling memoir of her ‘always performing' mother Erica
My first boyfriend told me with some pride that he'd read Erica Jong's Fear of Flying (1973) and Shere Hite's The Hite Report (1976). Though they had been selling in the millions, I hadn't yet read either, and was keen to find out what he had learned. He was only 16 at the time, the mid-1970s, and was a proto-male feminist. He was also tender, in defiance of Erica Jong's famous expression for spontaneous one-night-stand sex: 'the zipless fuck'. The boyfriend was a nascent sculptor and carpenter: his hobby was to collect roadkill and then painstakingly clean and reconstruct the animal's skeleton after removing the flesh and skin. His airy bedroom accommodated possums, rats, cats, birds and a wallaby. Their skeletons shed eerie shadows across us as we lay on his bed. He was genuinely interested in how things are made. This is a core question in Molly Jong-Fast's How to Lose Your Mother, which looks back from the vantage point of what she calls 'the worst year' of her life. Her mother's physical health and dementia are worsening, Jong-Fast is juggling a high-profile job as a political commentator (at MSNBC and CNN) with parenting three children, and her husband, Max, faces a series of life-threatening cancers. Then, she has to move her mother and stepfather (who also has dementia) into a nursing home. At the book's heart, though, is the question: How did my mother Erica Jong make me, and how have I struggled to remake myself? Her book is also very much about caring for your ageing mother – and about fame, and what happens when you're no longer famous – written by a funny, fast-talking daughter, who is also a political writer and public intellectual in her own right. Jong-Fast loves her mother fiercely, but is horrified by the way she was raised. The memoir is hilarious, moving and educational: Don't, whatever you do, parent like this. Fame made Erica Jong 'very boring' If you've ever wondered what it's like for the famous afterwards, this daughter's portrait is almost excruciating in the ways it details the sense of loss Erica Jong lived with for years: a disfigurement, even, a kind of dysmorphia. Why does the world no longer see me as I am – notorious, relevant, desirable, important? Molly Jong-Fast watches it all: Because she was, at the time, famous, people gave her a lot of leeway. But such allowances are a favour to no one […] Being able to get away with everything made her, in fact, very boring. Erica Jong became famous at the age of 31 with the publication of the novel Fear of Flying. She gave birth to her only child, Molly, five years later in 1978 – then lived with declining fame forever after. Fame encouraged Jong's highly self-absorbed tendencies, her belief that everyone – the public and her daughter – wanted to hear whatever it was she wanted to say: Eventually, Mom would answer, but never the questions I asked. She always seemed to have a sort of stock answer […] she was always performing. Jong published many novels and works of nonfiction over the next 30 years, and was constantly speaking and touring, but she never again achieved the impact of Fear of Flying. By the late 1990s, when Molly was close to 20 years of age and had gone AWOL on drugs and drink and was expecting to overdose any day, Jong was truly famous only among those who'd also experienced the excitement and hallelujah of the iconic second-wave feminist texts. Fear of Flying had ranked alongside Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch (1970), Our Bodies, Our Selves by Boston Women's Health Collective (1970), Kate Millet's Sexual Politics (1970), Anne Summers' Damned Whores and God's Police (1975), Adrienne Rich' s Of Woman Born (1976), Doris Lessing's To Room Nineteen: Collected Stories (1979) and Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber (1979). Fear of Flying enjoyed a 40th anniversary edition in 2013, deservedly so. It's a novel that embraces desire, politics, history, sex, marriage – the whole big mess – narrated with rapid-fire frankness and verve. Molly, her mother's only child, was sometimes kept close, alternately touring, partying and dining out with Erica and her lovers, literary friends and acolytes – or she was left in the care of her nanny, Margaret. One entire year, Molly and Margaret lived alone together while Erica and her ex-husband, Molly's father, Jonathan Fast, were elsewhere. I wish I'd asked her why, if she loved me so much, she didn't ever want to spend time with me, but […] in her view, she did spend time with me – in her head, in her writing, in the world she inhabited. I was there … Jong-Fast was made aware from the start that her mother wrote about her in her fiction and non-fiction; she had to tolerate strangers speaking intimately to her as if they knew her, based on what they'd read. Jenny Diski and Doris Lessing: 'less than perfect' Reading this, I was reminded of Jenny Diski's essays, first published in the London Review of Books, about her foster mother Doris Lessing, which she began writing only after Lessing's death in 2013. Like Jong-Fast, Diski's representation of her famous, very smart (foster) mother is compassionate and highly critical. Diski had come to Lessing at the age of 15, when Lessing was quietly famous: The Grass is Singing (1950), Martha Quest (1952) and her masterpiece The Golden Notebook (1962) were already published. Diski's parents were shockers: her father was a drunk and violent, and her mother sexually abused her after the father left. She found her way into Lessing's life in her house in Charrington Street, London. Lessing's son Peter had moved out; in her escape from her marriage and Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Lessing had left her older two children behind with their father. Allegedly, she felt an obligation to offer this very smart, underprivileged teenage girl a home. Lessing's caretaking of the teenage Diski took place during the height of British and American feminism's rejection of the role of mothering – which still very much held sway in the theory and practices of the feminist movement Molly Jong-Fast grew up in. In Diski's representation, Lessing's focus was on Diski's potentialities. She was uninterested in the maternal, nurturing aspects of the carer relationship: those, Diski would have to do herself. Lessing provided her with shelter, meals and clothing, money to go to school with – and around the dinner table, intelligent conversations with politically active and aware adults. It wasn't enough for Diski, and she was less than the perfect ward. Surliness, sex, interruptions to her school studies, drugs, another breakdown: the young Diski was very much like the young Jong-Fast. Both got sober and became writers. Diski disappointed Lessing, but Lessing didn't abandon her. They continued with their mother/daughter, carer/ward relationship until Lessing's death. After which, it seems on the face of it, Diski felt free – and driven – to write about her. Diski was diagnosed with terminal cancer that same year; another reason to put her experience on the record. The essays comprised her final book, In Gratitude. 'Thinking about my mother hurts' Similarly, Molly Jong-Fast is now writing about Erica when her mother is no longer able to read what she has to say. My mother was unattainable, but I tried. I keep trying. Now she is slipping away and our story really is over. Just in time to try and make sense of it. Jong-Fast shuttles between her early-morning work as a TV political analyst and podcast host, her mother's nursing home and Max's hospital bed. The evident, sustained care she gives to Max, her own children, to her mother and Ken, her stepfather, goes a long way to relieving the occasional desire for more restraint I felt on reading the curated, raw critiques of her mother's and her own suffering: There is a pain in me. Pain like a low ache […] like part of me is rotting or sick. Thinking about my mother hurts. Quintana Roo Dunne – Joan Didion and John Dunne's adopted daughter – is mentioned in passing as a girl whom Molly knew, who was also a lonely, alcoholic only child, and the child of writers and famous mothers. She was as lost as Molly, but she was not a survivor: she died, aged 39, after complications from pneumonia, following a lifetime of struggles with her mental and physical health. Unlike Jong, who spoke and wrote constantly about Molly, and Lessing (who, in Diski's estimation, based a key character in her novel The Memoirs of a Survivor on Diski's teenage self), Quintana rarely appeared in her mother's writing. And when she did, it was after her death, when she was the subject of Didion's Blue Nights. But Didion could not or would not reflect on the reasons for Quintana's suffering and early death: Andrew O'Hagan describes Blue Nights ' representation of Quintana as 'strange, anaesthetised'. Indeed. It is always harder for the mother to write of her own maternal grief, guilt and failings than it is for the daughters, the next generation, to write back. To tell how they were made by their mothers – and how they've remade themselves. In Jong-Fast's memoir, there is the gratitude and the fury you would expect. In her words: I'm a writer, for better or worse. This is what I do. Yes, just like my mother […] it is my job to make sense of the past, of her life, our relationship. Jane Messe is Visiting Fellow, Centre for Cultural and Creative Research, University of Canberra, University of Canberra.
Mint
29-06-2025
- Health
- Mint
Has dementia changed your loved one's personality? Here's how to prepare
It came without warning: an unfounded accusation, illogical and jarring. Jamini* (name changed on request) vividly recalls the day her 87-year-old father claimed she had concealed her college-going son's marriage from him. Her reaction—sharp and unrestrained—left her deeply regretful. The ensuing conversation was unsettling for both. 'I remember being aghast and upset at what he had said,' she reflects. 'But what remains etched in my mind is my father's diminutive frame, sitting in his room, hunched over and wiping his tears after I had yelled at him.' She embraced him, seeking reconciliation, believing it to be a fleeting episode. Similarly, Kumar* (name changed on request) was taken aback when his octogenarian mother accused him of hiding her jewelry and silk sarees. The confrontation escalated into a heated argument, culminating in him opening her steel cupboard to reveal the 'stolen' items, undisturbed on the shelves. When it strikes, dementia serves a crushing blow on the patient and their family. Author Molly Jong-Fast's memoir, How to Lose Your Mother, is a brutal narrative of hers and her mother, author-feminist, Erica Jong's lives after the latter was diagnosed with dementia. Jong-Fast plaintively declares in the book that 'Erica Jong the person has left the planet' and describes her self-reflection and guilt in making certain decisions during caregiving. Similarly, Bruce Willis's family, including wife Emma Hemming Willis and ex-wife Demi Moore, have been open about his progressive brain disorder (frontotemporal dementia) which affects behaviour, language and executive function, worsening over time. According to Dr Pramod Krishnan, HOD & consultant - neurology, epileptology & sleep medicine, Manipal Hospital Bengaluru, 'Dementia is most common in people aged 60 years or more. The incidence increases with every subsequent decade of life. However, less common types like frontotemporal dementia may start at a younger age.' The Journal of Global Health Reports projects an estimated 6.35 million Indians aged 60 and above to have dementia in 2025. In 2015, the figure was 4.1 million. The staggering increase could be attributed to an increase in ageing population and modifiable risk factors like diabetes, obesity, hypertension, smoking, air pollution, physical inactivity and social isolation. However, statistics offer little solace when one is confronted with the symptoms in a loved one. Dementia can have a variety of symptoms depending on the type of dementia and the areas of the brain that are predominantly involved. In Alzheimer's dementia, apart from memory decline which is the most prominent symptom, patients can have apraxia – an inability to perform learned activity to command, for instance, brushing teeth, using a knife or scissors to cut vegetable); visio-spatial disorientation – forgetting their way in the neighbourhood and even inside the house; simultagnosia – inability to appreciate multiple elements of a picture simultaneously. In frontotemporal dementia, patients have a change in personality. They may become socially withdrawn, apathetic, or they may become jovial, excessively talkative and show excess familiarity, behave inappropriately, adopt unusual dressing styles, display impulsive behaviours and language decline, have an inability to execute multistep activities and impaired judgement. In other dementia types, patients can have hallucinations, delusions and confabulations, dream-enacting behaviour, Parkinsonism, and gait abnormalities. But not even a comprehensive list of symptoms can prepare a caregiver for the extent of change their life may undergo once the loved one is diagnosed with dementia. 'When my mother-in-law was in the peak of her dementia frenzy, she would use the choicest swear words to scold her caregiver when all her life, she was soft-spoken and gentle-mannered,' says H, whose father was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's. Having navigated his father's Alzheimer's, he recognized the onset of dementia in his mother-in-law and advised his wife and family on how to manage the changes. Geriatric psychiatrist Dr Helen Kales from the University of California, Davis conducted research along with her colleagues to find that caregivers who have a system to address behavioural changes experience less stress. They devised the DICE method—Describe, Investigate, Create, and Evaluate—which provides a framework for caregivers to develop tailored care plans based on subtle behavioral changes and triggers. 'I realized my mother was at her most normal in the mornings just after she woke up,' Kumar said. 'So, I would make it a point to sit with her and have coffee together. She would converse like before, give me some advice or narrate some old incidents.' Experts suggest several behavioural changes on the part of the caregivers. For instance, if listening to news on TV agitates the patient, it is best to avoid news altogether and perhaps listen to music or watch a documentary that would calm them. Other significant actions a caregiver needs to do are: speak calmly with a relaxed body language, don't get hung up on giving facts or hard truths (lie ethically if needed), and above all, don't get into arguments. Instead, try to guide the patient to get exposure to natural light and engage them with games prescribed for dementia patients. While dementia cannot be cured, preventive measures may delay its onset. Jamini expresses a common sentiment: 'Even after the diagnosis, there was pretty much nothing I could do. The antipsychotic and sedative medications prescribed to manage the dementia-induced mood issues have limited efficacy. I have constantly wondered what I could have done to stave off my father's dementia.' Krishnan notes that controlling conditions like diabetes, hypertension, and cholesterol, along with abstaining from alcohol and smoking, can reduce the risk of dementia. Engaging in activities that stimulate the brain such as learning a new hobby or language, taking up sports, or solving puzzles can also be beneficial. For caregivers like Jamini whose parents have dementia, the concern extends to their own cognitive health. 'I remain pessimistic,' she admits. Still, she has enrolled herself in yoga classes, meets friends and relatives whenever possible, goes regularly for swimming and is planning to learn Sanskrit online. 'Something may perhaps work.' However, seeking some practical advice on how to stave off dementia, I asked my sharp-minded 104-year-old great aunt, who lives independently in Vellore, on how she managed to stave off dementia. She replied: 'I don't brood over the past nor worry about the future. I live in the moment.' Memory loss: According to Dr Pramod Krishnan, forgetting recent events is common, especially among older people. What differentiates this from the memory loss of dementia is the fact that these errors are consistent and progressive, getting more frequent with time. Sleep issues: Significant changes in sleep patterns, such as waking up at 3 a.m. or excessive daytime sleepiness, may signal dementia. Personality changes: According to a study by Angelina Sutin, a professor of behavioural sciences and social medicine at Florida State University, a noticeable decline in extroversion and agreeableness before cognitive impairment becomes evident. Other signs such as financial problems resulting from forgetting to pay bills, driving difficulties, and losing the sense of smell could appear in patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), and frontotemporal dementia. Jayanthi Madhukar is an independent journalist based in Bengaluru.
Daily Mail
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
My mom was an icon loved by millions - but here's the dark truth about her I've never told anyone
'My mother coined an expression for casual sex: 'The 'zipless f*ck,' writes Molly Jong-Fast in her new memoir, How to Lose Your Mother. 'Now think about being the offspring of the person who wrote that sentence. And pour one out for me.' Molly's mother is 1970s feminist icon Erica Jong. Best known as the author of the seminal, semi-autobiographical novel Fear of Flying - a book that caused a scandal at the time, thanks to its uncensored portrayal of female sexuality - Jong was wildly celebrated, with appearances on Johnny Carson, a Newsweek cover and friendships with the rich and famous. Now, Molly's memoir reveals not just the reality of growing up in the orbit of a glamorous, sexually uninhibited woman, but her heartbreaking descent - and slow disappearance - into the prison of Alzheimer's. 'She would always say that I was everything to her,' Molly writes in the memoir. 'She would always tell anyone who listened that I was her greatest accomplishment in life.' But, she adds, 'I always knew that wasn't the truth… I found her disinterested. Impossible to connect with. 'I wish I'd asked her why, if she loved me so much, she didn't ever want to spend time with me.' Now, it's too late. While Jong still recognizes her only daughter, Molly says she doesn't remember much else - not her grandchildren, and sometimes she doesn't even remember that she was once a famous writer. As her mother slips away, Molly finds herself faced with a terrible dilemma: How can she come to terms with losing her mother when she never really had her in the first place? Married four times, Jong was not really a woman's woman, her daughter now admits somewhat guiltily (and ironically, considering her place in the second-wave feminist pantheon). In fact, she says, she had trouble getting along with anyone who wasn't a man she wanted to seduce. Jong's third marriage - to Molly's father, Jonathan Fast - ended in an epically bitter divorce. 'Later,' Molly writes, 'my mother admitted they had an open marriage. My father, when questioned about this, said only, "Yes, she thought it was open."' Incredibly, both her parents moved out of the family home in Weston, Florida, following their split, abandoning Molly and leaving her in the care of her nanny. Only after a year did Jong summon her daughter to New York, where she was shacked up with a wannabe actor called Cash. 'She was always in love with someone,' writes Molly. 'More often than not, it was a problematic man, a "no-account" count, a married writer who lived in Brooklyn, or a drug-addicted B-list actor. 'Between her divorce from my father (husband number three) and her marriage to my stepfather (husband number four) there were numerous fiancés. I couldn't help but envision each one as a possible father. 'It would take me years to understand that the worst thing you could do to a kid was introduce her to possible stepfathers on a daily basis. But my feminist mother was always looking for someone to save her, someone to get her out of her own head.' Jong was often absent for days or even weeks at a time. But even when present, Molly recalls she was often distracted - 'dreamy, head-in-the-clouds, and detached'. Add to that a 'staggering lack of self-awareness' and her excessive drinking, and the picture is of a captivating, complicated woman addicted to fame. 'My mother never got over being famous,' writes Molly. 'Even years after people stopped coming up to us in stores, even years after she slipped from the public consciousness, the virus of fame had already made her someone different. 'Becoming normal like the rest of us, the journey to unfamousness, was for her an event so strange and stressful, so damaging to her ego, that she was never able to process it.' Then the pandemic broke her. 'When it started, she was her normal alcoholic self, not 100 percent but she would do things and go places. 'By the end she was lying in bed all day drinking a bottle or two of wine. 'An important caveat,' adds Molly, 'is that my mother wasn't a mean alcoholic like my grandmother (who used to get drunk, and scream at everyone, and pull off her clothes on the crosstown bus). 'But mom wasn't in there when she drank... My mother wasn't bad, she was just gone.' Perhaps that explains why it took so long for her to be diagnosed with Alzheimer's. That, and a fierce denial that anything was remotely wrong. Molly's stepfather, New York lawyer Kenneth David Burrows, had started to show signs of Parkinson's disease and, even after the threat of COVID had long passed, the pair rarely left their Manhattan apartment. Friends and neighbors kept coming up to Molly on the street, concerned, asking if her mom was OK. Her increasingly erratic behavior had been spotted everywhere - 'At the bookstore, at the hair salon, on the corner. Everywhere I went, my mother's condition followed me.' One night, while out to dinner, the wife of a friend leaned over and told Molly she had something to say that might be upsetting. The dinner companion then held up her phone, revealing an Instagram post featuring a photograph of her dead father. 'Your mother posted a comment on the photo,' she told Molly. The comment was: 'Neat.' 'The woman looked as if she were going to cry,' Molly writes. Addressing her concerns with her stepfather, she was met by excuses and denial. 'Look, Moll, this is a hearing problem,' he would say; and, 'Ah, Moll, you know she's just thinking of her next book.' 'But Mom hadn't written a book in a long time,' Molly writes in her own book. 'And suddenly I was 13 again, begging my stepfather to get my mother to stop taking diet pills, or to have her slow down on the drinking. 'Everyone told me I was crazy in that case, too. They would tell me that my mom didn't drink too much; she was just tired. She was just passed out on the bed, eye makeup smeared all over her face, lipstick everywhere. 'She was just working on another book. She was just under a lot of pressure. Ken would inevitably declare, "Once she gets her book done then she'll be back to normal."' This time, there was to be no 'normal,' and when Molly eventually found feces in her mother's bed, she knew it was time to find a nursing home for both declining parents. Ken died in December 2023. Jong continues to live in the 'world's most expensive nursing home' on New York's Upper East Side. 'Like my grandmother, my mother will likely continue on for the next 25 years in a state of dreamy, distracted unreality,' writes Molly. 'She will become increasingly unreachable.' 'My mother is just a body now,' she adds. 'Erica Jong the person has left the planet.' As much as this sounds as though she might be bitter or angry at her famous mother's neglect, Molly admits to being so close to Jong she sometimes lies in bed at night, unsure if she exists without her. 'She created me and I enabled her,' she writes. 'But there is a paradox at the heart of our relationship. 'As much as I love my mother, I've often found myself regarding her with feelings that are somewhat closer to the opposite of love. 'My relationship with her is split right down the middle. I admire her, but I pity her. I revere her - no, I worship her - but I am mortified by her.' And yet, Molly is still haunted by guilt. If she had been a 'better' daughter, she thinks, she would have taken her mother in and cared for her after Ken died. 'But I wasn't that daughter,' she admits. 'Did I wish I were that daughter? Maybe? But the main thing was that I had survived being her child. 'Sometimes you just have to put the life jacket on yourself first.'
New York Times
14-06-2025
- Health
- New York Times
A New Story Is Emerging About Dementia
If you've heard about Molly Jong-Fast's new memoir, 'How to Lose Your Mother,' it won't surprise you that a great many readers are coming for the juicy matricidal takedown of the feminist icon Erica Jong. I came for the dementia. Ms. Jong-Fast bracingly challenges the sentimental conventions of so many family stories, refusing to sacrifice her story to preserve appearances. The telling of her mother's cognitive decline, however, follows a pattern that shapes how we write and even talk about dementia, a condition that affects 57 million people worldwide. It's been described as the tragedy narrative. Perhaps you've noticed it, too. In its various iterations across books and films, the dementia tragedy narrative tells a story of inexorable decline and universal diminishment, in which the afflicted person steadily vacates her body until she becomes essentially absent. While this process may include moments of lucidity or levity, nothing substantially positive, life-giving or new can emerge for the person or her family and friends — because the person as person is disappearing. 'My mother is just a body now,' Ms. Jong-Fast writes. 'She has dementia. She has breath and hair and pretty blue eyes but Erica Jong the person has left the planet.' She is 'dissolving,' 'slipping away,' 'a faint fragment,' 'an echo,' 'a zombie.' The trouble with this well established approach is not that the tragedy narrative is completely false. There are indeed losses and suffering associated with dementia, experiences that confound and aggrieve, and these descriptions resonate with many people's own experiences. The problem is that narrating them in this manner, turning a multidimensional phenomenon into a story of unidirectional decline and disappearance, reinforces stigma around cognitive disability. And the notion that people are gone before they are dead directly harms the care they receive, exactly when they need it most. People with dementia are extremely vulnerable to being abused and neglected, financially drained (even just to get necessary care), improperly medicated and restrained, infantilized, ignored and socially abandoned. The tragedy narrative obscures the reality that a significant measure of their suffering emerges not from the condition alone, but from the social response to it — the part of the situation we are most able to fix. These assumptions are easy to find. They're sprinkled liberally throughout everyday language and metaphors, appearing anytime dementia is imagined as ceaseless suffering that turns people into shells, husks, the living dead or at least less 'real' versions of themselves. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
San Francisco Chronicle
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Dementia and ‘the virus of fame': Erica Jong's daughter maps mother's decline
Novelist and poet Erica Jong helped bring unvarnished female sexual desire into the literary mainstream. Now her daughter, writer Molly Jong-Fast, is mapping her mother's decline. 'How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir,' published by Viking on Tuesday, June 3, is about Jong's dementia and how Jong-Fast has cared for her 83-year-old mother, the author of 'Fear of Flying,' 'How to Save Your Own Life' and 'Parachutes and Kisses.' The book comes amid a wave of so-called nepo baby memoirs from Tom Hanks' daughter, Prince Harry and Lena Dunham, among others. Jong-Fast acknowledges her place in the trend. 'It is a huge advantage to be the child of a famous writer,' she told Vogue. At the same time, she continued, 'mostly the world doesn't necessarily want you to succeed. You just have to work super-hard and you have to be incredibly kind to everyone, which sometimes I do, and occasionally I fail (at).' In the book, excerpted in Vanity Fair, Jong-Fast reveals how fame warped her mother. 'Even years after people stopped coming up to us in stores, even years after she slipped from the public consciousness, the virus of fame had made her someone different. Becoming normal like the rest of us, the journey to unfamousness, was for her an event so strange and stressful, so damaging to her ego, that she was never able to process it,' Jong-Fast writes. She saw her grandfather, the novelist Howard Fast, suffer a similar fate. 'I never knew my mother or grandfather in the height of their respective fames, but I did know them at the end, when they were desperately trying to claw fame back from the writers who, they believed, had taken it from them,' she says in the book. Jong-Fast's previous books include two novels, 'Normal Girl' and 'The Social Climber's Handbook' as well as another memoir, 'The Sex Doctors in the Basement: True Stories from a Semi-Celebrity Childhood.' She's also a journalist, podcaster and political commentator.
