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Many of us might want to forget our miserable childhoods, but this rarely proves easy. “Wherever you turn, you run up against your childhood and hurt yourself because it’s sharp-edged and hard, and stops only when it has torn you completely apart,” wrote the Danish writer and poet Tove Ditlevsen, who felt pursued by hers long after it was over.
“You never grow out of your unhappy childhood,” writes Molly Jong-Fast in a similar vein. “You are never not that unhappy bitter little girl; even now, even at forty-five, I’m still the sad, angry girl who is the last-picked for sports, the last-invited to sleepovers, forever waiting for my mom to show up at a school event — any school event. And she never shows up. She never comes, not once.”
The elusive matriarch is “Feminist Icon” Erica Jong. Although, according to her daughter’s often rancorous, sometimes furious — though never self-indulgent — memoir, behind the scenes, Jong was neither as feminist nor as iconic as she was proclaimed to be. But her reputation was cemented thus in 1973, when the then-31-year-old published her debut novel Fear of Flying.
This groundbreaking story of a liberated woman’s quest for sexual pleasure went on to sell more than 20mn copies and turned Jong into a public personality and white second-wave feminist figurehead. She was paid $1mn to write a sequel, How to Save Your Own Life, published in 1977, and in 1978, she gave birth to her only child, Molly.
Fast-forward to 2023, and Jong is living with dementia. She and her (fourth) husband — who has Parkinson’s — potter about their Manhattan apartment, trying to read the newspaper, drinking endless cups of coffee, and neglecting their personal hygiene. Even the cushions of wealth and privilege can only do so much; it’s a sobering portrait of age-related infirmity.
Jong-Fast — living close by, with her husband and their three children, already juggling a career as a writer, political commentator and podcaster — is struggling. The practicalities are a nightmare, but the emotional toll brings all her childhood trauma bubbling to the surface. Throw in a series of other close family members’ deaths and serious illnesses — including Jong-Fast’s own husband’s diagnosis with pancreatic cancer — and she’s dealing with an “annus horribilis”.
Any life writing that reveals the indignities of a one-time powerhouse’s ailing body and/or mind walks a fine line. (John Bayley’s unforgiving, and some found unforgivable portrait of his wife Iris Murdoch’s descent into Alzheimer’s springs to mind.) But in this instance, it feels like just deserts. Outspoken about her own life, Jong drew no boundaries when it came to her daughter’s privacy, writing about her constantly. Even so, Jong-Fast is aware that this memoir is a betrayal of a kind. That she’s using her “sick mother” as “tragic subject-matter”. Her husband too, if she’s brutally honest. And she is — this book is nothing if not candid.
Growing up as the daughter of the woman who infamously coined the phrase “the zipless fuck” wasn’t easy. But factor in accounts of Jong’s alcoholism, narcissism and general absenteeism as a parent, and Jong-Fast’s childhood really does sound grim. Her mother had a stalker, who regularly returned to their doorstep — “like herpes” — and who knew “random stuff” about Jong-Fast, who often ended up having to talk to him. And when, age 14, Jong-Fast tells her mother that the creepy, sexualised attentions of one of Jong’s adult friends — a former studio executive — are making her uncomfortable, Jong just tells the child to “loosen up”.
If Jong-Fast sometimes sounds like an angry teenager, she’s got good reason. Put bluntly: bad mothers make bad daughters — a moniker with which Jong-Fast readily brands herself. But there’s also love in this book. The imperfect, painful, and maddening kind that so many readers will undoubtably be able to relate to.
How To Lose Your Mother by Molly Jong-Fast Picador £16.99/Viking $28, 256 pages
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