Publishers Weekly
★ 04/14/2025
Journalist Jong-Fast (The Social Climber’s Handbook) chronicles the worst year of her life in this staggering self-portrait. In 2023, Jong-Fast’s mother, Erica Jong, celebrated the 50th anniversary of her groundbreaking novel, Fear of Flying. It was also the year Jong was diagnosed with dementia. As Jong-Fast prepared to care for her mother, more blows came: her husband was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and her stepfather’s Parkinson’s began to worsen. Jong-Fast’s life became a flurry of doctors, lawyers, and accountants, as she was forced to place her mother and stepfather in assisted living and clear out the apartment the couple shared. Looking back over her and Jong’s relationship, Jong-Fast eloquently captures the loneliness she felt as “the only child of a once-famous mother” who was often inaccessible, leaving her daughter in the care of other women and dumping her lovers “the instant got sick or... boring.” Conversely, she recalls Jong’s intoxicating glamor, which led Jong-Fast to “adore more than a daughter has ever loved a mother.” Resisting tidy sentiment or easy answers, Jong-Fast dives headfirst into the often-difficult ambiguities of parent-child bonds. The results are stunning. Agent: Pilar Queen, UTA. (June)
From the Publisher
An Oprah Daily and Town & Country Best Book of the Summer
“Jong-Fast has put to words the tumult of the worst year of her life, captured and harnessed the experience so the rest of us can know that we are not alone. She’s Job with a sense of humor. . . . With propulsive humor and perspective on her annus horribilis, Jong-Fast achieves the memoir’s transformative work of alchemy, arming us all with lines so good you won’t just want to underline them, you will want to cut them out to share.” —The Washington Post
“Grief and rage coincide with comedy and uptown-literati charm. . . . Reading How to Lose Your Mother, one senses that the mother got the very daughter'she wanted, even if she had no idea what to do with her when she arrived.” —The New York Times
“In the tradition of the finest memoir writing, the author spares no one, herself least of all, as she untangles the bad from the good while still allowing for some tricky knots.” —The Los Angeles Times
“Often rancorous, sometimes furious, never self-indulgent . . . There's also love in this book. The imperfect, painful and maddening kind that so many readers will undoubtedly be able to relate to.” —The Financial Times
“Jong-Fast pours her heart and soul into this memoir of losing her famous mother. . . . She fights her way through the grief and rage with sharp self-awareness and a sense of humor that never deserts her. You think you’ve got aging parent problems? Let Jong-Fast tell you a story.” —Oprah Daily
“Through all the chaos that Jong’s past choices and current illness have unleashed on her life, Jong-Fast remains staunchly committed to the project being her own person: “I am sober and sort of sane and not my mother,” she writes—words that feel almost like a guiding mantra for the book.” —Vogue
“With deep feeling and clarity, Jong-Fast recalls coming of age with a parent whom she adored but sometimes felt at arms length and the surprising ways in which the parent-child relationship continues to change deep into adulthood.” —Town & Country
“This raw, intimate memoir is a stunning portrait of difficult relationships and how we survive them.” —People
“Jong-Fast, a dazzling writer, illuminates the tug of love and loss, as well as the importance of giving grace. She sheds light on a generation often overlooked, torn between caring for children and parents while facing the relentless pressures of life. ... Her words lend depth to the endless mystery that is love and how it pummels us with its light, joy, hardships, and countless iterations.” —Maria Shriver’s Sunday Paper
“Molly dives deep into her complex relationship—or lack thereof—with Erica in her sharp and beautifully written (no surprise there) new memoir." —AirMail
“For those working through grief in complicated forms or just understanding different types of parental relationships, Molly Jong-Fast's How to Lose Your Mother is a great read." —Teen Vogue
“A gripping memoir about mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, loss and healing, and what it means to finally accept your past and become an adult. Despite being raised in the shadow of fame, Molly tells a story that is both uniquely specific and utterly, exquisitely relatable.” —Lori Gottlieb
“Molly Jong-Fast conveys the mess, terror, loneliness and glory of familial love, in all its riveting complexity.” —Claire Messud
“Molly Jong-Fast’s memoir is mesmerizing, intimate, wise, unputdownable, crazily honest, heartbreaking, funny, illuminating—beautiful and painful at the same time, just like real life.” —Anne Lamott
“I was just bowled over by this book.” —Nigella Lawson
“Resisting tidy sentiment or easy answers, Jong-Fast dives headfirst into the often-difficult ambiguities of parent-child bonds. The results are stunning.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“[Jong-Fast’s] honesty, her self-awareness, and her grief keep you on her side, as well as her humor, understated, blunt, and sometimes black. . . . The best book Jong-Fast could have written about the worst year of her life.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Library Journal
04/18/2025
Vanity Fair contributing writer Jong-Fast (The Social Climber's Handbook) delivers as she turns from novels to memoir with a gripping, emotional account of the complexities of mother-daughter relationships. Jong-Fast grew up in the shadow of her mother Erica Jong's stardom after the wild success of Jong's 1973 novel Fear of Flying. Jong-Fast describes the loneliness she felt as her mother rushed off to social engagements and how little time they had to connect once her mother became an icon of second-wave feminism. Fast-forward 50 years to the near-present, and Jong-Fast is dealing with the medical diagnoses of both her husband and mother—he with a rare cancer, and she with dementia. As Jong-Fast struggles with the emotional burdens of her new role as caregiver, she finds that she has a rare chance to find connection and healing with her mother. Readers will relate to the raw vulnerability she expresses in her relationship and will feel both pain and uplift as they make their way through the book. VERDICT Similar in style and tone to Michelle Zauner's Crying in H Mart, this memoir is sure to be a favorite among fans of the genre for its compulsive readability and realness.—Mattie Cook
MAY 2025 - AudioFile
This deeply personal and powerful memoir, though witty and snarky, has a bittersweet tone and an often self-critical pose. Political journalist and TV commentator Jong-Fast is a hyper-aware writer whose famous mother, Erica Jong, the author of FEAR OF FLYING, was a narcissistic drunk with little time for her daughter. In this meditation on fame, Jong-Fast explores midlife exigencies and takes a clear-eyed look at her own alcoholism--she's been sober for 26 years. She details the fraught year, 2023, when she put her mom with dementia and stepdad with Parkinson's into a nursing home and her husband contracted cancer, requiring extensive surgery. While her plaintive voice takes a little getting used to--listeners should persevere. She narrates with raw emotion, intense passion, and a propelling pace. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2025, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2025-02-15
A self-described nepo baby faces the hardest part of nepo adulthood.
Despite being the 50th anniversary of her mother’s famous novel,Fear of Flying, 2023 was not easy for Jong-Fast, daughter of Erica Jong and Jonathan Fast—and an author, podcaster, political commentator, wife, and mother. Due to their declining mental states, her mother and stepfather had to be pried out of their apartment and moved, very unhappily, to assisted living. Her husband, Matt, 59, learned he had a mass on his pancreas; yes, it was cancer; and his own father was failing. This was not all. It has never been easy to be Erica Jong’s daughter; her total involvement with her career and with the men in her life absorbed all her time and energy. “She couldn’t even spendone hour with you,” Jong-Fast’s father tells her. “The most she could do was half an hour.” There was a nanny, private schools, fancy hotel rooms, trips to Venice, celebrities galore, but it was far from a happy childhood: “I was born to privilege, born on third base, but desperate to strike out and go home.” By the age of 19, Jong-Fast was in recovery; this, her 26th year of sobriety, was marked by the continuing damage and sorrow of her mother’s alcoholism. “So much of our lives have been about alcohol that it makes me want to cry.” Jong-Fast is obsessive and merciless about her mother’s drinking as well as her many other profound character flaws, and the miracle of this book is that you feel no need to judge her for that. Her honesty, her self-awareness, and her grief keep you on her side, as well as her humor, understated, blunt, and sometimes black. A typical reflection: “My dad has a moral core, a kind of spirituality and a quest for joy that I do not have. I’m not even sure I’d want it. Which is perhaps not the greatest self-analysis.” “I am a bad daughter,” she tells us over and over, but it’s pretty clear she did the best she could.
The best book Jong-Fast could have written about the worst year of her life.
