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How to Lose Your Mother<\/p>\n
Jong-Fast is the only child of the once-notorious novelist Erica Jong.<\/p>\n
In 1973, at age 31, Jong published her racy novel Fear of Flying, which broke the news to the English-speaking world that men were not the only gender who enjoyed casual sex.<\/p>\n
Jong became a cultural sensation. Although she published more than 20 books in the intervening years, she never again did anything as momentous.<\/p>\n
Molly says here that mom was \u201ca world-class narcissist\u201d interested in her work, her famous friends and herself. Oh, yes, and in drinking wine. Lots of wine.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe would always say that I was everything to her,\u201d writes Molly, 46, a U.S. TV political analyst, podcaster and author of two novels and two other memoirs. \u201cShe would always tell anyone who listened that I was her greatest accomplishment. I always knew that wasn\u2019t the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n
Molly\u2019s father, by the way, was Jong\u2019s third husband Jonathan Fast. That marriage broke up when Molly was a young child. Husband No. 2 had been Chinese-American psychiatrist Allan Jong, whose surname Erica (ne\u00e9 Mann) kept.<\/p>\n
Molly goes easy on dad here. Even though he moved to California and had a second family, she saves her vitriol for mom. A typically catty judgment: \u201cShe always had trouble getting along with people who were not men she wanted to seduce.\u201d<\/p>\n
In later years, Molly writes, she and her biological father bonded over the fact that they were both the children of \u201csame-sex narcissists.\u201d<\/p>\n
Molly\u2019s paternal grandfather was the prolific McCarthy-era novelist and Communist Howard Fast, best known for the 1960 movie adaptation of his novel Spartacus.<\/p>\n
\u201cI never knew my mother or grandfather at the height of their respective fames,\u201d she notes, \u201cbut I did know them at the end, when they were desperately trying to claw fame back.\u201d<\/p>\n
To the degree that this memoir has a structure, it is a narrative of Molly\u2019s \u201cannus horribilis,\u201d 2023.<\/p>\n
Coming out of the pandemic, she had to move her mother, suffering from dementia, into a nursing home and deal with the decline and death of her stepfather Kenneth Burrows, Jong\u2019s longtime hubby No. 4.<\/p>\n
Moreover, Molly\u2019s own husband (15 years her senior and father to their three children) was treated for a form of pancreatic cancer. At the end of the book, touch wood, he is OK.<\/p>\n
\n\t\tWinnipeg Free Press | Newsletter\n\t<\/p>\n
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But the book is primarily an excuse for Molly to exorcise her demons over feeling unloved and ignored as a child.<\/p>\n
Mom was an alcoholic who let her be raised by her nanny. No surprise, Molly overdid the drugs and booze as a teenager. Miraculously, she got sober after a stint in rehab at age 19, and goes to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings to this day.<\/p>\n
Aside from the amusing celebrity name-dropping \u2014 both mom and daughter move in predominantly Jewish circles of New York media and culture \u2014 there is not much else to tell.<\/p>\n
Although she does tell it, over and over again.<\/p>\n
Retired Free Press editor and writer Morley Walker admits he has never read Fear of Flying.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Once you get past the dishy first third of this Mommy Dearest-style memoir, you can be forgiven for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25224,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[353,49,48,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-25223","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25223\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}