'How To Lose Your Mother' by Molly Jong-Fast review: You never outgrow a bad childhood

Jong-Fast reflects on being Erica Jong's daughter, addiction and sobriety, and her year from hell in a striking, compulsively readable memoir

"My mother coined an expression for casual sex: the 'zipless fuck'. Now think about being the offspring of the person who wrote that sentence. And pour one out for me," writes Molly Jong-Fast in 'How To Lose Your Mother', a reference to her famous mother Erica Jong, who wrote one of the defining novels of the second-wave feminist movement, 'Fear of Flying'.

Erica, according to Molly, was a neglectful, detached alcoholic mother who could not bring herself to spend even an hour alone with her only daughter. She also could not resist the urge to air the intimate details of her family and friends' lives in her writing. Nor could she resist the urge to give unprompted, cringe-inducing, extended drunken toasts at weddings - nor, it turns out, could she resist moving house and leaving her pre-teen daughter to live with only her nanny for an entire year in the old house.

Molly's accounts of Erica's actions are scorching and damning, not in their tone but in the precision with which she describes the long-lasting emotional scars they left. Reflecting on her mother, now struck with dementia, Molly's tone takes on a mixture of regret, frustration, affection and sympathy that registers as compellingly authentic and unvarnished. In the end, she concludes, Erica "was a damaged person, and she wasn't a bad person. She tried her best. And it is true that sometimes your best is actually not good at all. Sometimes your best is terrible."

Though the circumstances of Molly's upbringing - both in terms of the affluence and the shadow of fame - are far from commonplace, 'How To Lose Your Mother' is filled with revelations that feel starkly relatable and are told in compelling, matter of fact fashion. For instance, reflecting on the similarities between her and her father (who as the son of Howard Fast, also grew up in a famous parent's shadow), Molly writes, "He and I both have a certain fragility to us, a feeling that maybe the world is too much for us."

“She tried her best. And it is true that sometimes your best is actually not good at all. Sometimes your best is terrible" - Molly Jong-Fast

When Molly isn't writing about her upbringing, her teenage years or a stint in rehab at 19 followed by a lifetime of sobriety, Jong-Fast's fifth book primarily focuses in on her "year from hell". In this time, Molly's husband was diagnosed with cancer, her mother and stepfather were sent to a care home with dementia, said stepfather later died, and then Molly's father in law, aunt and longtime AA sponsor also died (the latter having drunk herself to death).

Yet, despite the immensity of the grief documented, 'How To Lose Your Mother' is never a particularly bleak read - in large part because of Jong-Fast's keen sense of humor. Recalling visiting her Jewish mother the day after the horrific October 7 attacks, Molly is told by a dementia-addled Erica that the two of them should travel to Israel to fight for the IDF. "I was so delighted that Mom didn't have Twitter any more," Molly dryly commentates, imagining "the joys of her weighing in on the nuances of the Israel-Palestine conflict". Earlier, Molly looks at the two tasks ahead of her one day - writing a eulogy for her aunt and penning a Daily Beast column on fabulist ex-congressman George Santos - and wonders which is worse.

At the book's end, Molly reflects on her year of loss and her mother's end of life. "I guess we're the grown ups now," she tells her husband. This is 'How To Lose Your Mother''s final form, a shrewd meditation on preparing for (and moving into) the stage of adulthood that follows the loss of your parents - knowing that any hopes of healing any remaining wounds in these relationships are gone, and that in the grand scheme of life, you're next in line to go (a sobering reality that draws into sharp focus one's life choices this far and the direction in which one is heading).

Ending her memoir in January 2024 with her husband, whose cancer prognosis has steadily improved, Jong-Fast writes: "We entered the new year as the adults we had to be."