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.