How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir

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.

Author: Molly Jong-Fast
Publisher: Viking
Published: 06/03/2025
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.84w x 1.02d
ISBN: 9780593656471


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 04/18/2025 pg. 9
Kirkus Reviews 03/15/2025
Booklist 04/01/2025 pg. 17
Publishers Weekly 04/14/2025
Shelf Awareness 06/13/2025

About the Author
Molly Jong-Fast is a contributing writer at Vanity Fair, a political analyst at MSNBC News, and host of the podcast Fast Politics with Molly Jong-Fast. She is the author of three previous books. She lives in Manhattan.