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San Francisco Chronicle
2 days ago
- 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.
Gulf Weekly
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Gulf Weekly
Maternal musings
NON-FICTION book How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir by Molly Jong-Fast is set to hit the shelves on June 10. In it, the author dives into the complicated relationship she always had with her mother, Erica Jong, a famous American novelist and poet. She also describes how watching her mother 'slipping away' due to memory loss has been affecting her; Erica, who was diagnosed with dementia, is currently residing in a retirement home. Erica Jong is best known for her 1973 novel Fear of Flying, which resonated with women who felt stuck in unfulfilling marriages and helped start a feminist movement. According to Molly, Erica never got over being famous, elaborating that she was never able to process drifting away from the public consciousness after once being an inescapable name in the media, which made her 'inaccessible'. 'I wish I had asked her why, if she loved me so much, she didn't ever want to spend time with me, but there was no way she would have ever given me a straight answer. And besides, in her view, she did spend time with me — in her head, in her writing, in the world she inhabited,' Molly said in an interview. Following in her mother's footsteps, Molly is also a writer and journalist who holds a Master's degree in Fine Arts and is the author of two novels, Normal Girl (2000) and The Social Climber's Handbook (2011).
