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Much has been written on the subject of maternal loss—prose elucidating the strange, excruciating ways losing a mother might actually lead you to her. Memoirs that begin in childhood are exercises in memory and mirroring. Such stories often culminate in the realization that the mother you thought you knew was a figment of your imagination or a faded photograph. The real woman is rife with nuance, not to mention rough edges (women famously contain multitudes). Author and political commentator Molly Jong-Fast’s memoir, out this month, is a map of her own circuitous route through abandonment, adoration, rage, and grief—and an acrobatic leap out of her mother’s long shadow.

Jong-Fast is the daughter of Erica Jong, an autofiction ingenue of feminism’s second wave whose novel Fear of Flying, a hysterical (in all senses of the word) account of a straight woman’s internal combustion as she reckons with the incompatibility of her politics and her desire, rocketed her to fame in 1973. Jong trained her raunchy, analytical wit on her friends, lovers, and children, but she never spared herself.

While Jong was more of a jet-setter than an archetypal homemaker, she ascribed to the notion that anyone who can’t take the heat should get out of the kitchen. In her memoir, she wrote, “If [Molly] has to put up with a writer-mother, she’ll take her revenge with words.”

How To Lose Your Mother is Molly’s attempt to do just that. Yet like most efforts to get even, this book is rooted in wounded intimacy: It is a love letter of sorts detailing the trials and tribulations of being raised by a mother who was famous, glamorous, unavailable, and alcoholic.

Jong-Fast’s is part of a cresting wave of books exploring modern motherhood that counts Sarah Hoover’s brazen account of postpartum depression and Hannah Zeavin’s history of moral panics around “bad mothers” among its ranks. Not to mention the mushrooming market share of “mommy thrillers” in crime fiction, a subgenre whose existence proves many of the points in Zeavin’s muscular chronicle of the surveillance technologies that have cropped up to monitor mothers and children.

How To Lose Your Mother approaches the motherhood micro-genre from a unique angle: rooting its inquiry in the moment when a child must learn to parent their own mother. Jong-Fast recounts the year of her mother’s dementia diagnosis and its rapid acceleration, candidly outlining her transformation from neglected daughter to neglectful pseudo-mother herself. In doing so, she illuminates the suffocating existential corsets that bind our archetypes of “good daughters” and “good mothers.” Jong-Fast writes that she periodically “bristled at the whole project of this memoir: 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?”

The day before Jong-Fast’s book hit shelves, we met up at San Vicente Bungalows in the West Village to talk fame, feminism, motherhood, aging, and what “peak nepo” might mean. I even experienced an essential rite of passage for any culture reporter––getting yelled at for taking a call inside a member’s club you’ve never been to.

Tomorrow is pub day, right? How are you feeling?

I’m 46 and I’ve written my fourth book. I feel good about what I’ve done. As much as it’s about me, it’s also about you in a way—about human life and having parents and children. I know it’s good because I have friends who are really honest––wait, I feel like you’re incredibly young. I can’t tell.

I’m 30. 

You look like you’re 23.

Thank you. I was accused of being an unaccompanied minor at JFK last year.

For so long, you’re like, I don’t have bags under my eyes. Who are these people who have bags under their eyes? The next day you wake up and you’re like, Oh shit. Forty-five is when it happens. What were we talking about?

Friends who will––

Who will tell you the truth. You have to have people around you who will say, “That dress makes you look fat.” It’s one of the great things about my husband: He’s a real person. We were going somewhere the other day and he’s like, “Are you going to angry cry? Are you mad that you’re not getting what you want?”

Luckily, I have enough gay guys in my life who will speak truth to power.

That’s what you want.

In this book, fame is a disease, a distraction, and a form of proto-dementia––you have a great line about the way that fame afforded your mom an incredible amount of leeway for her bad behavior. But in the end, “being able to get away with everything made her very boring.” 

Fame is like magic; it’s the closest thing we have to it. A famous person moves through the world in a totally different way than the rest of us. I think what happened to my mother is that she was an alcoholic, a narcissist, and then she got famous. I’m friends with Jacob Bernstein. When his mom, Nora Ephron, got famous, she was able to use the fame to do cool stuff, take care of her kids, because she wasn’t an alcoholic or a narcissist. But for my mom, it combined all the worst elements—I think it was very hard for her to pull back.

This book takes place over a year, but also multiple lifetimes: your own, your mother’s, your grandfather’s. How did you approach rendering what is simultaneously a condensed and an expansive timeline?

I write a column every week. So I’ve been writing weekly, a tight thousand words, for about a decade. That and Twitter have made me a better writer—I’m always thinking about how things move and how they’re absorbed. I had two editors on this book. One was Andrea Schulz, who’s at Viking and is so good, so smart. The other was Adrienne Miller, who was a fiction editor at Esquire and is brilliant. She would be like, “You have to put that in, where is this, there’s not enough of this.” That Maxwell Perkins style of editing really helped me.

It’s very intriguing to me that one of your editors works in fiction, because “truth” is famously tricky territory for memoirists, given memory’s fallibility. You’ve written novels, you’re a journalist––how does working in those genres influence your approach to memoir?

I have two first cousins that I’m very close with, and I was talking to one of them on the phone about the book. She read the book early on and said, “Everything in that book is true.” As someone who got sober at 19, I want to talk about alcoholism, and I want to destigmatize it. I want people to know you can get sober as a teenager and stay sober for the rest of your life. It can be normalized. That is my goal. I wanted to talk about my grandmother’s alcoholism because it is a family disease, but I also didn’t want to hurt anyone who is not a public figure, so that was a delicate balance. I was much more worried about collateral damage [to them] than my mom.

You write about your mother’s alcoholism and her dementia as having disfiguring effects on her personality and memory. How did your relationship with your mother change over the period this book traces? 

The single most damaging thing about my childhood was familial alcoholism. I never could figure out if what was happening was real—if it was in my head or in their head. It was so destabilizing. I wanted to write about that to push it away, and in another sense, to understand it. When you have an unhappy childhood, you’re so stuck in it. I really wanted to write about the sense of unreality created by an alcoholic upbringing.

On the topic of children, and on a slightly lighter note, there’s a hilarious moment in the book when you quote an essay you wrote about deciding to have a child at 24. Joking about the impact of motherhood on a woman’s social and professional life, you say you’ll probably spend less time on the roof of Soho House. But we’re on the roof of San Vicente Bungalows right now, and you’re a very successful woman. Can you talk about having a child as a young woman writer—especially one with complicated feelings about motherhood?

I was born in the late ’70s. Women didn’t work then as much as they do now, and they didn’t have identities like we do now. We don’t pause and think enough about how much things have changed for women. My mother was not Gloria Steinem. People really wanted her to be, but she wasn’t capable of it. She was an academic who left grad school, who became an unwitting sex symbol in a way that she was not comfortable with. That was hard for her to move past.

After I read your book, I re-read Fear of Flying, and I have this old edition with an all caps blurb about how EROTIC it is, but I found it to be far less sex-focused than it’s remembered to be. It’s more of an experiment in high-octane intellectualism, a woman steeping herself in literary history, feminism, Freudianism.

And that killed her, by the way.

This year has seen reissues of some of her second-wave peers’ books. How might we think about second-wave feminism in our current moment, when much of the left seems to have largely abandoned feminism as an analytical paradigm?

Even at the height of second-wave feminism, there was so much pushback. I was re-reading Susan Faludi’s Backlash recently: She is enraged. It’s a very prescient book, because you see how much all of this is cyclical, that it really is always “two steps forward, one step back.” One of the funnier things about it is that she’s so furious at the mainstream media for all the ways they undermine feminism. But now, the mainstream media is gone. It’s just Theo Von in a basement.

How did looking back at your mother’s life affect your perception of what remains of the media ecosystem? 

One amazing thing my mom did was to get me to believe that I was really smart. As a dyslexic who got counseled out of private school when I was in third grade, she made me think I was brilliant. She really did believe I could do anything. So much of modern life is being able to say, Why not me? She did that in an incredible way. I hope that I have instilled that belief in my kids. What’s so interesting about this moment is that, as much as we bemoan that the mainstream media is gone and you can’t be Joan Didion anymore, there are no gatekeepers. You really can be anything.

You write about the archetypes of the “good daughter,” “good wife,” and “good mother.” Did writing this book allow you to exorcise any of the pressure to play those roles?

I definitely feel, with this book, that I’m done with my childhood. I’m 46 years old, and I feel like I’m finally out of it.

I’m going to be a child ’til then, too.

I was talking to someone recently about how it takes longer to grow up now. Because people live longer, and also because we, for whatever reason, are a little more arrested. The thing that I have trouble with is being hard on myself––I think it’s a woman thing, I think it’s a culture thing. This is a very punishing culture to grow up in.

Speaking of the culture, I feel like psychoanalysis is a real comeback kid these days. You write in the book that Freud wasn’t quite hitting for you as a child, but that tradition was hugely influential to your mother’s writing. Perhaps she thought it was a ridiculously misogynistic house of cards, but it was one she wanted to live and fuck in. 

My mom was incredibly into therapy, loved Freudian analysis. She had this crazy shrink in the ’80s called Mildred Newman, who wrote this book, How to Be Your Own Best Friend. Mildred had these therapy groups where everyone was insane with each other. I was in therapy, but I left.

Are we talking lying on the couch, free association, or “regular” therapy?

I was in everything. I was in Freudian therapy, I was in therapy at three, I was in therapy at five. At some point, what I discovered is that I don’t think I’m so interesting.

There’s a moment where you (hilariously) call semi-inheriting your mother’s assistant “maybe peak nepo.” Do you have thoughts on the evolution of nepo baby discourse lately?

I think almost everyone is a nepo. I’m always impressed with people who are like, “My father was a farmer.” It’s like, “Who told you about this profession?” If my mother were a doctor, I would have been like, “Hell yeah.” I tend to be friends with almost everyone, but in my 20s, I was really competitive. I was definitely competitive with other nepos. Now I’m just delighted that we’re all alive. The thing about being a nepo is, you get in the door, and it’s a huge advantage because people do sort of secretly root for you. The problem is, you’ll be 80 and someone will still ask, “What was your mom like?” It’s double-edged, but it’s huge—especially in an attention economy.

Were there any other nepo baby memoirs you turned to for inspiration? Have you read Lady Caroline Blackwood’s daughter Ivana Lowell’s? She might have come up with the perfect title for a memoir, in my opinion: Why Not Say What Happened? 

She’s very cool. Every time I met her, I thought she was phenomenal and brilliant. I love Susan Cheever, she writes really well about it. Adam Bellow. It’s a well-trodden path.

You write about trying to understand the truth about your family, but there were “so many lies that it was impossible to know what really ever happened. And honestly, conjecture is probably more interesting than the truth.” There’s a moment in Fear of Flying when your mother breaks the fourth wall and asks, “Surely you don’t suppose that I’ve been telling you the truth this whole time?” She’s been telling a man her life story, maniacally embellishing. What do you think of the notion that truth in writing can be more evocative than informative?

With political writing, you really can’t fuck around. Everything has to be sourced. You have to be careful, because even if you’re completely committed to getting everything right, you still make mistakes. I have become very crazy about making sure that everything is right. With memoirs, it’s totally different. My mom had a very different relationship with the truth. But back then, they played everything much faster and looser, too.

There’s a moment where she’s thinking about her own larger-than-life mother, and wonders, In what corner could I act out what I so presumptuously called my life? I was curious if that line brings anything up for you, because I felt like it could have come from your book, too.

My grandmother was really a bad mother, so mean to her daughters. I think my mom had it much worse than me in some ways. It was such a male-dominated culture. The joke is that all my mom wanted was to be Philip Roth, and now Philip Roth is lost to history. Norman Mailer was on the cover of every magazine every day, and now he’s completely lost. Doesn’t that weird you out?

I have a bad feeling those guys are about to make a big comeback among younger men. Last question: Can you name something underrated, overrated, and adequately rated?

Overrated is tuning out and not following politics. Not knowing what’s going on doesn’t solve anyone’s problems. Underrated is subscribing to three newspapers: We get the FT, The New York Times, and the New York Post. Don’t tell anyone we get the New York Post. One of my kids subscribed to the New York Post to stick it to me. Rated correctly is C-SPAN. You should be watching C-SPAN. Here’s why it’s great: Nobody’s making any editorial decisions for you. Elon Musk said he’s a free speech absolutist, which is bullshit. C-SPAN is free speech.

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