Molly Jong-Fast Reflects on Her Mother’s Dementia and the Fleeting Nature of Fame
For Molly Jong-Fast’s entire life, people have approached her to “talk” about her mom. When she was younger, it was to talk about Erica Jong, a feminist icon, literary celebrity, and dominant force in the culture—famous for her book Fear of Flying, famous for being famous, and famous for her provocative comments about sex.
Then, four years ago, the talk became about her mother’s painful slide into dementia, writes Jong-Fast in her new memoir, How to Lose Your Mother:
Their voices would inevitably be hushed and perhaps a bit halting. Sometimes the person would take my hand.
“How is your mother?” they would ask.
And then they would offer up one of the following comments:
“Is your mom…okay?”
“Are you sure she’s okay?”
“She seems off.”
“She can’t remember anything.”
“There’s something really wrong with her.”
Everywhere I went in my little neighborhood, I found myself surrounded by people who wanted to talk to me about my mother’s failing memory and her increasingly erratic behavior: at the bookstore, at the hair salon, on the corner. Everywhere I went, my mother’s condition followed me.
I went to a British restaurant for dinner with my husband and a famous poet—which is kind of an oxymoron, I know—and the poet’s wife, a novelist. At the end of the dinner, the wife told me she had something to say that might upset me.
“No, it’s okay,” I said.
Was it okay? Who knows. I’ve always floated around like some kind of Erica Jong Rorschach test. I am a repository for people’s feelings about my mother, about feminism, about the sexual revolution.
And then, of course, there is the little issue that my mother has never had a filter. She’d always say the worst possible thing. That was one of her trademarks. Sometimes when I’d be sitting at a dinner, or watching her give a talk, a thought would pop into my mind: What is the worst possible thing she could say? And without fail, she’d say it. I remember watching in horror as someone live-tweeted her appearance at a book festival. I couldn’t control what she said or what people thought about her, but at least I could control one thing: When I was young, I decided not to read her books.
I braced myself for whatever the poet’s wife was going to say.
She explained that she had posted a photograph of her deceased father on Instagram. She picked up her phone to show me the post. I considered the picture of the woman’s father. He looked like all deceased fathers: old.
“Your mother posted a comment on the photo,” she said.
“Okay.”
I was so past feeling embarrassed by things my mother said and did. I lived in this kind of perpetual post-embarrassment state. I could take this.
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—Meena Ganesan, senior editor
