No one should have to endure a year like the one Molly Jong-Fast contended with in 2023, an ordeal she recounts with arresting honesty in How to Lose Your Mother. Her mother is Erica Jong, the author who grabbed the world by the lapels and shook it hard with her 1973 novel, Fear of Flying, and its unsanitized chronicle of female sexual desire. Born in 1978, Jong-Fast grew up privileged in New York, with a nanny and private schools. She became so addicted to drugs and alcohol as a teen that she had to spend a month in a Minnesota rehab facility. By 2023, she had been sober for 26 years but had plenty of new problems. Her mother was experiencing dementia; her stepfather was in a similar situation. And Matt, her 59-year-old husband, developed a mass on his pancreas. As doctors put it, "We think it's the bad cancer."
That Jong-Fast felt she had no choice but to put her mother and stepdad into "the World's Most Expensive Nursing Home" does nothing to mitigate her sense of being a "bad daughter." Neither did the knowledge that her mother was more devoted to her career than to her child. What could have been a Mommie Dearest revenge book is instead a sympathetic portrait of personal anguish and conflicting priorities, all of it leavened by Jong-Fast's wit, as when she refers to Jong's many boyfriends, all of them possible stepfathers, as "a Ferris wheel of potential lives." This memoir is a dauntless portrait of one family's reckoning with life's most difficult problems. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer