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Vogue
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Vogue
In Her New Memoir, ‘How to Lose Your Mother,' Molly Jong-Fast Charts a Bold New Path By Examining Old Family Ties
As a child, writer and podcaster Molly Jong-Fast tried to squeeze as much time and attention out of her work-focused, celebrity-obsessed mom, Fear of Flying author Erica Jong, as possible, describing Jong's regard as 'fairy dust.' 'Growing up, I wondered how such a glamorous person had birthed me,' Jong-Fast recalls. 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.
The Age
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
If I could interview Donald Trump, this is what I'd ask him
This story is part of the June 1 edition of Sunday Life. See all 14 stories. Writer Molly Jong-Fast is best known for being a commentator on US politics. She is also the daughter of Erica Jong, the author of the 1970s feminist tome Fear of Flying. Here, the 46-year-old discusses the important men in her life, including her grandfather, Howard Fast, who wrote Spartacus. My paternal grandfather, Howard Fast, wrote Spartacus as well as 80 other published books. One of my favourite things about him was that he was smart and disciplined. He would wake up at 5am and you'd hear the typewriter going. He was very much a product of the Charles Dickens' paid-by-the-word kind of writing. He went to prison for three months in 1950 for his communist beliefs. In his memoir, he said everything that was bad about him – like cheating on my grandmother, Bette, a sculptor, with whom I was very close – was not in his FBI file. My father Jonathan, a writer and later a social-work professor, and my mother Erica Jong [author of Fear of Flying ], were introduced by my grandfather. They moved from California to Connecticut, where I was born. When I was three, they had a bad divorce. My mother moved out and left me with the nanny. After that, I'd see Dad every other weekend. Then, a year later, I went to live with Mom in New York. I am like my father as we both have red hair. We both get motion sickness and both have big feet. I was a bad teenager and very entitled. Drugs, drinking and blacking out were my focus at high school in the Bronx. I got along with boys OK. I wasn't uncomfortable, but I wasn't super comfortable either. My first celebrity crush was Jay McInerney. I was in that generation that thought he and the literary brat-pack that also included Bret Easton Ellis were the coolest. Mom married four times and had numerous fiancés. She looked for someone to save her, and to get her out of her own head. I kept meeting these men and thinking they were going to be my father and then they were not. I liked some of them better than the ones she ended up with. I am the daughter and granddaughter of alcoholics. But I am so different to my mom because I got sober when I was 19, and so I didn't ever have to be, or didn't want to be, her.
Sydney Morning Herald
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
If I could interview Donald Trump, this is what I'd ask him
This story is part of the June 1 edition of Sunday Life. See all 14 stories. Writer Molly Jong-Fast is best known for being a commentator on US politics. She is also the daughter of Erica Jong, the author of the 1970s feminist tome Fear of Flying. Here, the 46-year-old discusses the important men in her life, including her grandfather, Howard Fast, who wrote Spartacus. My paternal grandfather, Howard Fast, wrote Spartacus as well as 80 other published books. One of my favourite things about him was that he was smart and disciplined. He would wake up at 5am and you'd hear the typewriter going. He was very much a product of the Charles Dickens' paid-by-the-word kind of writing. He went to prison for three months in 1950 for his communist beliefs. In his memoir, he said everything that was bad about him – like cheating on my grandmother, Bette, a sculptor, with whom I was very close – was not in his FBI file. My father Jonathan, a writer and later a social-work professor, and my mother Erica Jong [author of Fear of Flying ], were introduced by my grandfather. They moved from California to Connecticut, where I was born. When I was three, they had a bad divorce. My mother moved out and left me with the nanny. After that, I'd see Dad every other weekend. Then, a year later, I went to live with Mom in New York. I am like my father as we both have red hair. We both get motion sickness and both have big feet. I was a bad teenager and very entitled. Drugs, drinking and blacking out were my focus at high school in the Bronx. I got along with boys OK. I wasn't uncomfortable, but I wasn't super comfortable either. My first celebrity crush was Jay McInerney. I was in that generation that thought he and the literary brat-pack that also included Bret Easton Ellis were the coolest. Mom married four times and had numerous fiancés. She looked for someone to save her, and to get her out of her own head. I kept meeting these men and thinking they were going to be my father and then they were not. I liked some of them better than the ones she ended up with. I am the daughter and granddaughter of alcoholics. But I am so different to my mom because I got sober when I was 19, and so I didn't ever have to be, or didn't want to be, her.
New York Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Devastating Book Erica Jong Always Knew Her Daughter Would Write
Ever since she was a child, Molly Jong-Fast has struggled with the disorienting feeling that there are two versions of her. There's her real self, then there's her literary doppelgänger, the Molly-like character who crops up frequently in her mother Erica Jong's memoirs and novels. Whenever a stranger or acquaintance seemed to know intimate details about her — like her bratty behavior as a teenager, or her struggles with drug and alcohol addiction — Ms. Jong-Fast would freeze. She had to assume they had read all about her in her mother's books. Naturally, she resented having her private life, including some of her worst moments, repurposed as literary fodder. So she recognizes that some will see her brutally honest, scorched-earth memoir about her mother — a feminist and cultural icon who is now 83 and has dementia — as an act of literary retribution. She doesn't entirely disagree. 'It feels like a huge betrayal,' Ms. Jong-Fast said in an interview at her bright and spacious apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where she sipped a cappuccino and cradled Bucephalus, one of her three small white Chinese crested dogs, in her lap. 'I sold out Erica Jong, but it's sort of in honor of her.' Ms. Jong became famous with the release of her 1973 debut novel, 'Fear of Flying' — a story about a married woman's pursuit of casual sex. It became a critical and commercial blockbuster that drew praise from John Updike and Henry Miller and went on to sell more than 20 million copies. Ms. Jong was lauded for her unapologetic depictions of women's pursuit of sexual pleasure and autonomy, back when such subjects were still scandalous. She was equally uninhibited about exposing personal details in her memoirs and interviews, and ruthlessly pillaged from the lives of those around her. Anyone in her orbit risked being reanimated as thinly disguised characters in her work — friends, husbands, boyfriends and exes, as well as the person she professed to love most, her only child, Molly. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Her Famous Mother Was Always Inaccessible. Then She Developed Dementia.
HOW TO LOSE YOUR MOTHER: A Daughter's Memoir, by Molly Jong-Fast 'Pour one out for me,' Molly Jong-Fast writes in 'How to Lose Your Mother,' her memoir of 'the worst year of my life,' 2023, in which her stepfather dies, her husband is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and her famous, forever unreachable mother succumbs to dementia. But she's not referring to all that: She's referring to one sentence in the best-selling 1973 novel 'Fear of Flying,' which made Erica Jong into a second-wave feminist icon, offering a woman's perspective on no-strings-attached sex, or what she called the 'zipless fuck.' 'Think about being the offspring of the person who wrote that,' Jong-Fast writes. In the memoir, the political journalist and novelist describes her childhood with a mother who had more time for media interviews and dinner parties than she had for her child. Jong 'went from man to man trying to find an identity,' the daughter writes, while leaving her with a nanny Jong then fires when it suits her. At times 'I bristled at the whole project of this memoir,' Jong-Fast writes: 'a daughter trying to come to terms with the loss of a mother. But I never had Erica Jong. How can you lose something you never had?' When her mother did pay attention, her affections were erratic. Jong-Fast 'started going to Venice as a child because my mother had a lover there,' she writes, an Italian man who was married to a German countess. Jong would spontaneously invite her daughter into her bed to watch TV and eat Ben & Jerry's, and take her on budget-less shopping sprees at Bergdorf's. 'Mom had that fairy dust,' Jong-Fast recalls thinking at the time. 'There was just a feeling with Mom that anything could happen. … She was singularly the most glamorous and inaccessible person I'd ever known.' As a teenager Jong-Fast copes with the chaos via drugs and alcohol, then gets sober at 19. When she tells her mother, a lifelong alcoholic and narcissist, that she wants to go to rehab 'because I'm going to die,' Jong replies: 'I think you're being overdramatic.' (She has a similar response decades later, when Jong-Fast nearly dies in childbirth.) At the same time, Jong-Fast says, 'she was always so proud of me, always so delighted by everything I did.' But this attempt at magnanimity feels at odds with her suggestion that Jong needed her to succeed, lest the child's failure reflect poorly on the mother herself. Having overcome a learning disability to end up in a profession similar to her mother's, Jong-Fast has written a memoir that feels like an effort to transcend her mother's narrative with her own, while still remaining deeply bound to the family form. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
