Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
NON-FICTION book How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir by Molly Jong-Fast is set to hit the shelves on June 10.
In it, the author dives into the complicated relationship she always had with her mother, Erica Jong, a famous American novelist and poet. She also describes how watching her mother ‘slipping away’ due to memory loss has been affecting her; Erica, who was diagnosed with dementia, is currently residing in a retirement home.
Erica Jong is best known for her 1973 novel Fear of Flying, which resonated with women who felt stuck in unfulfilling marriages and helped start a feminist movement.
According to Molly, Erica never got over being famous, elaborating that she was never able to process drifting away from the public consciousness after once being an inescapable name in the media, which made her ‘inaccessible’.
“I wish I had asked her why, if she loved me so much, she didn’t ever want to spend time with me, but there was no way she would have ever given me a straight answer. And besides, in her view, she did spend time with me — in her head, in her writing, in the world she inhabited,” Molly said in an interview.
Following in her mother’s footsteps, Molly is also a writer and journalist who holds a Master’s degree in Fine Arts and is the author of two novels, Normal Girl (2000) and The Social Climber’s Handbook (2011).
