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 binge-worthy 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.

©2025 Molly Jong-Fast (P)2025 Penguin Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

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

Raw & Real

I was captivated by this memoir. I read Erica Jong in the 70's and now know what a trial it was to be her daughter. The deeply reflective book is filled with angst, regret & complicated emotions. It's a deep reconnecting - and the author narrates it in a voice like no other.

Relatable Story

Don’t be put off by the author’s reading style. Yes, she speaks in an exaggerated prep school drawl, swallows sentence endings, and channels it all through an annoying, affected rasp. None of these things bother me when she is doing commentary on television, but listening to her read this way was distracting at first, and I doubted I could listen to the whole book. Glad I stuck with it. HOW TO
LOSE YOUR MOTHER is a well-told tale of dealing with multiple mid-life challenges at once: a spouse with cancer, a mother’s descent into dementia, career, staying sober. For those of us who came of age when the author’s mother, Erica Jong, was a literary icon, HOW TO LOSE YOUR MOTHER is a meditation on the ephemeral nature of fame and the meaning (or lack of meaning) of success, genetics, parenting, and what is owed to parents in their final years. Molly Jong-Fast also provides us with a sobering epilogue to the brief but dazzling era where Erica Jong was a cultural superstar. Highly recommended.

we have a lot in common.

I liked it all. So relatable. Turner. good writer. So authentic. It was a page turner.

like a conversation

I liked everything. it was like having a conversation with Molly Jong fast. utterly heartbreaking.

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.

Heroic

Anyone with a bad childhood will instantly relate to the conflicting emotions expressed by the author.