‘How to Lose Your Mother’: Molly Jong-Fast’s sizzling memoir of her ‘always performing’ mother Erica

My first boyfriend told me with some pride that he’d read Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973) and Shere Hite’s The Hite Report (1976). Though they had been selling in the millions, I hadn’t yet read either, and was keen to find out what he had learned.

He was only 16 at the time, the mid-1970s, and was a proto-male feminist. He was also tender, in defiance of Erica Jong’s famous expression for spontaneous one-night-stand sex: “the zipless fuck”.

The boyfriend was a nascent sculptor and carpenter: his hobby was to collect roadkill and then painstakingly clean and reconstruct the animal’s skeleton after removing the flesh and skin. His airy bedroom accommodated possums, rats, cats, birds and a wallaby. Their skeletons shed eerie shadows across us as we lay on his bed. He was genuinely interested in how things are made.

This is a core question in Molly Jong-Fast’s How to Lose Your Mother, which looks back from the vantage point of what she calls “the worst year” of her life. Her mother’s physical health and dementia are worsening, Jong-Fast is juggling a high-profile job as a political commentator (at MSNBC and CNN) with parenting three children, and her husband, Max, faces a series of life-threatening cancers. Then, she has to...

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