June 11, 2025

How to Lose Your Mother, by Molly Jong-Fast

I saw myself in Molly Jong-Fast’s memoir, How to Lose Your Mother, specifically the part where she writes about how strangers project onto her their feelings about her novelist mother, a burden that she has born in good spirits, all things considered. When I published an essay about her mother’s iconic 1973 novel Fear of Flying way back when, I tagged Jong-Fast in a Twitter post, and I think she even shared it. Although in the years since, Jong-Fast has come to mean an awful lot to me as a person in her own right, in the last five years that I’ve been listening to her podcast, which continues to be a balm to my anxiety and has helped me make (some) sense of the chaos of our era, but then it turns out that making sense of chaos is something Molly Jong-Fast has been doing for a very long time.

And this novel is a document of that process, a memoir of her childhood born to famous artistic parents for whom “parenting” was not a verb, and of the neglect she experienced as her mother chased fame and ignored her addictions, and also a memoir of Jong-Fast’s very difficult year as her mother’s dementia advanced and Jong-Fast’s husband was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, among other heartbreaks and calamities. Sober since age 19, Jong-Fast has designed a very different life from her mother’s, marrying at 24 and finding joy as the parent to three children, and now as her mother begins to decline (and her stepfather is dying from Parkinson’s concurrently), Jong-Fast resents the time she’s forced to spent caring for parents whom she feels never cared for her.

I really appreciated this honest portrayal of the realities of eldercare, and Jong-Fast’s awareness of her limits, her refusal to be a martyr. I also love the complexity of the mother-daughter relationship she constructs, that it’s all love all the same, even with the failures of mother and daughter both at various points in the relationship. That love is a multitudinous thing, but also that person has the right to own their own soul, their own story, which was the point of Fear of Flying after all, a lesson that perhaps is just one of many gifts (along with the burdens) that Molly Jong-Fast inherited from her imperfect mother.