Molly Jong-Fast, with her multi-coloured hair, chic eyeglass frames, Chinese crested dogs, urbane wit and sharp intelligence, has become an esteemed political pundit renowned for her journalistic commentary and frequent appearances on cable news networks. She is also the daughter and granddaughter of American-Jewish literary royalty.
Jong-Fast’s grandfather was Howard Fast, the novelist and screenwriter who was jailed and blacklisted for not naming names before the notorious congressional Un-American Activities Committee. Fast’s epic novel Spartacus was turned into a celebrated film directed by Stanley Kubrick, starring his nemesis Kirk Douglas and adapted by Dalton Trumbo, another blacklisted writer Fast personally disliked.
Similarly complex relationships are woven through this painfully funny, heartbreaking memoir, whose title is derived from Jong-Fast’s adoring yet extremely ambivalent relationship with her mother, the writer Erica Jong. Erica Jong is the author of 27 books but is renowned for her autobiographical novel Fear of Flying, considered a landmark of second-wave feminism. Published in 1973, five years before Jong-Fast was born, it gained universal acclaim for “its candid depiction of women’s sexual desires [which] was extremely shocking at the time”.
With her come-hither looks, flowing blonde hair and vibrant sexuality, Erica Jong also became a tabloid celebrity thanks to her numerous marriages, reported liaisons and frequent, sometimes pugilistic, appearances at the New York literary hangout Elaine’s.
Erica Jong was also a high-functioning alcoholic in denial about everything, especially her alcoholism. Other than husbands, Erica had few friends, because she had trouble getting along with people who were not men she wanted to seduce. She also had a pathological need to write about everyone all the time, including her only daughter, Molly, chubby and dyslexic, who believed herself to be an outlier in a family of great beauties, writers and successful showmen. Nora Ephron, a writer contemporary of Erica Jong, said that for her “everything was copy. Real life didn’t exist. It was all just fodder for the next book”.
Besides alcohol and men, Erica Jong was hopelessly addicted to fame. Jong-Fast begins: “I am the only child of a once famous woman … fame, like alcoholism, rings a bell in you that can never be unrung.” It is this paradox of her mother’s endless need for public adulation and inability to accept that she is no longer as famous as she once was that is one of the central themes of this book.
But how can you lose something you never had? “She created me and I enabled her … I know that she loved me, but I also know that she never seemed particularly interested in me.” Furthermore, “I admire her, but I pity her, I revere her, no, I worship her, but I am mortified by her. She said she desperately wanted me, but I spent most of my school breaks in a trailer park in Tampa with my nanny.”
These emotional contradictions are frustrating, but somewhat ameliorated by Jong-Fast’s wit and her keen assessment of her narcissistic, unself-aware, celebrated mother. Though the memoir is suffused with Jong-Fast’s unfulfilled yearning, it is also her subtle revenge. Jong-Fast has turned her mother into her book’s subject in the same way that her mother had utilised every element of her childhood as content in her own novels.
How to Lose Your Mother is not a self-flagellating pedantic reminiscence. Though reflective, it is very much the tale of Jong-Fast’s survival and incredible coping and managerial skills. Perhaps in imitation of her mother, Jong-Fast was an adolescent alcoholic. But she became sober at the age of 19, younger than New York’s legal drinking age. Regular attendance at AA meetings has been one of the psychic touchstones of her life. In a recent interview, she confessed (despite AA vows of secrecy) that she sponsored Joan Didion’s daughter Quintana Roo Dunne, adding that she wasn’t revealing anything that had not already been said by Didion herself in the posthumous publication of Letters to John.
How to Lose Your Mother is also: “The story of what happens when the bottom falls out, all the tests come back bad, when the doctors tell you there’s nothing more to do. This is the story of the worst year of my life.” Or as her friend said, “It’s a Jewish beach read because it’s a very fast read, but it’s about death.”
In this memoir, everyone is dead or dying, except for Jong-Fast, who shows amazing resilience and incredible organisational skills. Though Erica Jong is the larger-than-life mother dominating this memoir’s landscape, Jong-Fast is telling not only the saga of their ambivalent mother-daughter relationship but the shocking events of her own annus horribilis that begins with the death of her dog Spartacus and her beloved friend, the writer Fay Weldon. Her mother has descended into dementia and her beloved step-father Ken is succumbing to Parkinson’s disease that prevents him from caring for his wife. “It was the poop in the bed that made me know it was time.”
With deft sensitivity and some hired help, she moves her parents out of their apartment into nearby luxurious nursing care, without ever deflating the illusion that they will one day return home. While moving her parents, Jong-Fast organises her three growing children, her career and, last of all, comes to terms with the shocking revelation that her husband, Matt, has pancreatic cancer.
She never feels sorry for herself. Like the greatest of her literary ancestors, Jong-Fast does not descend into madness, but rises into survival. She accepts her fate, but never stops making the right decisions and acting upon them.
How To Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir, by Molly Jong-Fast (PanMacmillan, $39.99), is out now.
