HOW TO LOSE YOUR MOTHER

A self-described nepo baby faces the hardest part of nepo adulthood.

Despite being the 50th anniversary of her mother’s famous novel, Fear of Flying, 2023 was not easy for Jong-Fast, daughter of Erica Jong and Jonathan Fast—and an author, podcaster, political commentator, wife, and mother. Due to their declining mental states, her mother and stepfather had to be pried out of their apartment and moved, very unhappily, to assisted living. Her husband, Matt, 59, learned he had a mass on his pancreas; yes, it was cancer; and his own father was failing. This was not all. It has never been easy to be Erica Jong’s daughter; her total involvement with her career and with the men in her life absorbed all her time and energy. “She couldn’t even spend one hour with you,” Jong-Fast’s father tells her. “The most she could do was half an hour.” There was a nanny, private schools, fancy hotel rooms, trips to Venice, celebrities galore, but it was far from a happy childhood: “I was born to privilege, born on third base, but desperate to strike out and go home.” By the age of 19, Jong-Fast was in recovery; this, her 26th year of sobriety, was marked by the continuing damage and sorrow of her mother’s alcoholism. “So much of our lives have been about alcohol that it makes me want to cry.” Jong-Fast is obsessive and merciless about her mother’s drinking as well as her many other profound character flaws, and the miracle of this book is that you feel no need to judge her for that. Her honesty, her self-awareness, and her grief keep you on her side, as well as her humor, understated, blunt, and sometimes black. A typical reflection: “My dad has a moral core, a kind of spirituality and a quest for joy that I do not have. I’m not even sure I’d want it. Which is perhaps not the greatest self-analysis.” “I am a bad daughter,” she tells us over and over, but it’s pretty clear she did the best she could.

The best book Jong-Fast could have written about the worst year of her life.