How to Lose Your Mother

A Daughter's Memoir

De: Molly Jong-Fast

Narrado por: Molly Jong-Fast

“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 bingeable 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

“A gripping memoir about mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, loss and healing, and what it means to finally accept your past and become an adult. Despite being raised in the shadow of fame, Molly tells a story that is both uniquely specific and utterly, exquisitely relatable.” —Lori Gottlieb

“Molly Jong-Fast conveys the mess, terror, loneliness and glory of familial love, in all its riveting complexity.” —Claire Messud

“I was just bowled over by this book.” —Nigella Lawson

Stunning

MJF’s unpretentious, powerful, expertly woven story was both gut-wrenching and a total pleasure. This story will resonate with all daughters who’ve never been able to find their mother.

A daughter’s story

I could not put this down. Profoundly moving and insightful story of a daughter trying to make peace with her mother and with herself. Very moving. Thank you, Molly.

Terrific

Very funny and very sad. A meaningful story. Truly worth the listen. Very well done.

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

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.

we have a lot in common.

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

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.

Heroic

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