"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.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Viking
Published: 06/03/2025
ISBN: 9780593656471
Pages: 256
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.25h x 5.50w x 0.63d

Review Citations: Library Journal 01/01/2025 pg. 9
Kirkus Reviews 03/15/2025
Booklist 04/01/2025 pg. 17