Summer—even in Toronto—feels like beach-reading season, so I decided to set whither-liberal-democracy aside for one column, in favour of reviewing a juicy new book about a Jewish literary icon.
Why do I feel bad admitting to having viewed Molly Jong-Fast’s bestselling new memoir How to Lose Your Mother in this light?
The formula for a successful memoir in recent years has been for someone with an enviable-sounding life to reveal that actually, glamor is miserable. To be a prince, a supermodel, a pop star, a member of the Facebook inner circle, it might sound fabulous, but it’s all rather tragic. Celebrity gossip exists, as ever before, but reframed so that the celebrities have taken control of the narrative, and so that the gossips understand themselves as rather lucky to be plebs. These books elicit, in the reader, a sentiment I have referred to as envy-pity. Names are dropped, but for the purpose of conveying that even those who hob-nob with the finest have their low points. The dishy memoir as guilty pleasure is done. We’re all too trauma-aware for that now.
How to Lose Your Mother is Jong-Fast’s third memoir. It covers a genuinely awful-sounding year she spent caring for (or, as she interprets it, arranging care for) her mother Erica Jong, as well as her own husband, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in the midst of all this. She hops back and forth between terrible 2023 and other parts of her life, with particular emphasis on her relationship with her mother. Jong-Fast is, by her own account, famous-adjacent, an active anti-Trump presence on social media who parlayed this into punditry and now appears on MSNBC.
Erica Jong was and possibly is famous on a different scale, the author of, most notably, the 1973 novel Fear of Flying, a classic up there with Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. It is a true top-tier twentieth century novel, a must-read of the American-Jewish and feminist and general canon. In it, Jong writes about female desire and Jewish identity in—not to be trite—the way I think but cannot articulate. If you’re off to the beach and wondering whether to bring Fear of Flying or How to Lose Your Mother, I could not in good faith suggest you take the latter. But if you have room for two books, they would make for an interesting duo.
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Who is the intended reader of How to Lose Your Mother? I ask in part because it was much-recommended to me personally, for what I can only assume is my reputation for being the sort of person who’d be into Erica Jong. (Not inaccurate!) Jong-Fast mentions repeatedly that she has never read any of her mother’s books, so if you wanted to learn more about Jong the artist, you’d come up short. It is all about Erica Jong the real person, and after that, Erica Jong the cultural figure, as seen from her daughter’s perspective.
It’s not a hagiography, but nor is it a reputation-ruining exposé ala what happened with Alice Munro. If you were about to throw Fear of Flying into a bonfire, you can hold off. An art monster Jong may be, but a monster-monster would be pushing it.
One learns from Jong-Fast that her mother was, in her heyday, big into being famous and less enthralled with domestic mundanities. That she was more enthusiastic about seducing men than about making friends or listening to what other people had to say. (No great surprise if one takes Fear of Flying as autofiction.) Jong—hardly unique among working women and interesting this is never said of working men—outsourced much of her childcare. Also, more troublingly, she was—is—an alcoholic, at least in her daughter’s estimation. She introduced her daughter to her (that is, mom’s) boyfriends earlier than is advisable. Not winning Mom of the Year, but also more dysfunctional than abusive.
It’s like if Absolutely Fabulous were real, and daughter Saffy were a notch less stuffy, and mom Edina a bit more together and far more objectively accomplished. A compelling mother-daughter-conflict read, with two strong personalities represented.
The “was” versus “is” question dominates the book, for Erica Jong is suffering from dementia but is still alive. Jong-Fast writes about her in the past tense. This seems ethically dubious. During her time as a “was,” as in, in the period the book covers, Jong does such things as give a talk at Barnard and—after observing the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7 on the news—announces that she thinks it is her and her daughter’s duty as Jews to go and fight in Israel. These do not negate the dementia diagnosis, but nor are they the acts of a was.
Jong-Fast writes disapprovingly of her mother not always wearing a bra under her shirt while at home, in a nursing home. That seems both needlessly cruel, and a bizarre standard to hold any woman to, whatever her mental state. The title could well have been, How to Cancel Your Mother.
It is a revenge book. Jong wrote about her daughter’s childhood, at least in fictionalized form, so Jong-Fast has a go at her mother’s second childhood. This is spelled out, and clear from the start, with Jong having literally soiled the bed, her daughter at the ready, airing the literal dirty laundry. After decades in her famous mother’s shadow, Jong-Fast now gets to be the sharper of the two. Now she’s the one calling the shots, and—due to a newish career in political punditry—the one on television. Jong-Fast has unresolved grievances from her childhood, as well as a lede-buried new one in the form of learning that she will not, as her mother had assured, be getting a big inheritance. It is, in its defence, a self-aware revenge book, as in, Jong-Fast makes repeated mention of this maybe kinda-sorta entering into the project.
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Becoming her mother is, writes Jong-Fast, “the one thing” she has “feared above and beyond all others.” She seems particularly concerned with mimicking “the ever-present Erica Jong problem of unexamined privilege.” And yet she cannot hear herself. (Can any of us?) For all the discussion of her mother’s narcissism, she comes across as maybe not the most selfless person. Regardless of the family tragedy around her, she recalls going on vacations (not work trips) to Los Angeles, to Venice, simply because she feels moved to do so, because of nostalgia the places evoke for her. She muses on nepotism and decides to meet Adam Bellow, Saul’s son, at her club, because of course she has a club. She writes, of her mother buying an Upper East Side townhouse, that it “sounds like a posher situation than it actually was,” insisting that New York of the 1980s and 1990s “was not fancy.”
Her preferred adjective is “fancy.” Nursing homes, restaurants, apartment buildings, dog-breeders, funeral parlours, all get described as “fancy.” She has an unpleasant interaction with “a fancy corporate lawyer in a suit.” Writer and perennial Pinterest favourite Joan Didion? You guessed it: “fancy.” Apart from my wishing Jong-Fast taken more of a thesaurus route, this rather epic use of “fancy” struck me as an attempt at being privilege-aware. She is demonstrating that she knows how her rarified world comes across. Or rather, she is trying to do this. But it has the effect of making it seem as though she imagines herself to exist somehow outside of her own milieu. If you grew up in “fancy” surroundings and never left, then they would not be striking you as fancy.
I realize this may make me an exception as a reader, but I’d find such things far more tolerable if they weren’t packaged as coming from someone aware of her privilege. I prefer when a writer leans into the subjectivity of their vantage point.
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At the start of the book, Jong-Fast refers to her mother’s most famous coinage, from Fear of Flying. I mean the unprintable one, the one beginning with “zipless,” a reference to anonymous sexual encounters. “Now think about being the offspring of the person who writes that sentence. And pour one out for me.” Why? Why is she asking the reader, even in a tongue-in-cheek manner, to feel bad for her about this? Other stuff, fine, but this?
As an ethical complaint, being written about by your parent is different from being squicked out by your parent writing things that are not about you, for which you are not the audience. Fear of Flying came out before Jong-Fast was born. Should the mere possibility she might one day have children stop a woman from writing frankly—and in fiction, at that—about sex, and about women having desires? Should being a mom prevent her from doing so? I can see squirming in embarrassment about this as a kid, but in your 40s and as a mother yourself?
Jong-Fast’s perception that her mother had other preoccupations that interested her more than motherhood was probably accurate. She was raised by a nanny and fed TV dinners because Erica Jong preferred writing and doing publicity and, yes, finding boyfriends to a more intensive form of parenting, even by the standards of the less-helicopterish era.
I’m sure this was a childhood that left much to be desired. There’s still the question of how noteworthy the story would be if the famous-writer parent had been her father. For all the gesturing at faulting Erica Jong for out-of-touch white feminism, there’s something regressive about the way the book takes mom to task, when non-famous dad simply left the family home, remarried, and moved on with his life.
And yet, hidden in plain sight beneath the name-dropping and privilege-acknowledgment, there is a book that I appreciated: a frankly told story of one woman during one difficult year of her own one life. A woman with demographic and idiosyncratic specificities, but facing life challenges (a mother with dementia, a husband with cancer) that privilege can only do so much to mitigate. A story told not because the teller believes she objectively has it worse than anyone else, but because it feels important to her, the person living it. Of course we’re hearing her story rather than some other lady’s in a large part because she is, as she admits, a “nepo baby.” But it’s not privileged to think that whatever’s happening to you matters more for that reason. It’s the human condition.
The CJN’s opinion editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected], not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. Subscribe to her podcast, The Jewish Angle wherever you get your podcasts.
