How to Lose Your Mother

A Daughter's Memoir

De: Molly Jong-Fast

Narrado por: Molly Jong-Fast

Instant New York Times Bestseller

“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

“This raw, intimate memoir is a stunning portrait of difficult relationships and how we survive them.” —People

“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

From the political writer and podcaster, a ferociously honest and disarmingly funny memoir about her elusive mother’s encroaching dementia and a reckoning with her complicated childhood

Molly Jong-Fast is the only child of a famous woman, writer Erica Jong, whose sensational book Fear of Flying launched her into second-wave feminist stardom. She grew up yearning for a connection with her dreamy, glamorous, just out of reach mother, who always seemed to be heading somewhere that wasn’t with Molly. When, in 2023, Erica was diagnosed with dementia just as Molly’s husband discovered he had a rare cancer, Jong-Fast was catapulted into a transformative year.

How to Lose Your Mother is a compulsively readable memoir about an intense mother–daughter relationship, a sometimes chaotic upbringing with a fame-hungry parent, and the upheavals that challenge our hard-won adulthood. A pitch-perfect balance of acceptance and rage, humor and heart, How to Lose Your Mother tells a universal story of loss alongside a singular story of a literary life. This is a memoir that will stand alongside the classics of the genre.

Outstanding in content and narration!

The raw and beautiful and heartbreaking sharing of a year in the life of Molly Jong Fast. I am moved beyond words in this telling. To be so honest and so generous in the sharing of this time in her life is something that will stay with me always. I thank her for it.

The whole story and Molly as the narrator.

Beautiful and deep. Very relatable and painful. Childhood memories that are too vivid and too insightful.

What goes on behind closed doors

how someone perceives another person’s intentions makes everyone’s experience in the world a little different

Good read

Authors candid portrayal and she voiced the book. I will read her mothers book now.

A Messed Up Family Just Like Mine

Loved this book. I laughed. I cried. I saw myself and my own f-d up family throughout its pages. My dad has Alzheimer's and my siblings are very difficult (to put it politely). Few people in the family are not "in denial" when it comes to Dad's affliction, just as in Molly's family. The loneliness she describes as being the only (relatively) functional person - that's something I identified with again and again. If you have a dysfunctional family, if you have anyone famous in your family (or just a little famous, like my own mom, Nancy McDonald)... this book is well worth the time. Loved it.

love that Molly shared this with the world

How relatable the relationships were. You can feel Molly's emotions as she delt with an incredibly hard year .

Raw, relatable, poetically read by author

Caring for two parents w advanced dementia in a independent living and not in my home, noone else helping, i found so much guilty pleasure and relief from Molly's storytelling....I was pulled in by her voice to face hard truths of decisions she had to make while trying not to spiral.

thought I would like it more.

I found it to be a little self-indulgent. The struggle of an unhappy childhood it's never easy, but the point continued to be made even after we got it completely. In these dark times, I was hoping for a few small cracks where the light could have come in a little more.

Great for adult children of difficult parents

I've seen Molly on MSNBC many times, but never realized she was Erica Jong's daughter. I just finished this in 2 days, and it's refreshing and gritty and wonderful. Molly knocked this out if the park!

I wanted to finish it but it was so depressing.

I like that it was written and narrated by Molly Jong-Fast. I saw her on Real Time recently and liked her and that is why I wanted to listen to her book. I love when authors narrate their personal stories. By chapter 9 I felt so sad and depressed that I could not listen to the rest of the book. I have family issues and listening to this book brought so many sorrowful memories back. I wanted to finish the book but it was too difficult. Be prepared to go through a wild ride of emotions.