Person on the Page

As the daughter of a bad mother, I admit that I am drawn to memoirs in which a child dishes dirt on a parent.

When I saw the title of Molly Jong-Fast’s recently published book How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir, I suspected that, like Jennette McCurdy in I’m Glad My Mother Died, the author had chosen to trash Mom in the wake of her demise.

Except that Jong-Fast’s famous mother, Erica Jong, isn’t dead. The 83-year-old feminist powerhouse author, most noted for her 1970s book Fear of Flying in which she vies for women’s sexual freedom, is still alive and suffering from dementia in an assisted living facility.

Jong-Fast’s title, How to Lose Your Mother, suggests that the daughter of a deceased parent is reaching out to readers with advice about how to deal with this commonplace loss. (Or does the word lose mean escape or get rid of ?  Is it really How to Give Your Mother the Slip?)

We might assume that this is another of the myriad popular self-help manuals, a “how to” book offered to the sandwich generation of which Jong-Fast is a member, those who balance raising children with caring for and facing the demise of aging parents.

However, in this book, that’s not what readers get. Instead, it embodies the author’s attempt to cope in the near-aftermath of a lifelong troubled relationship with her mother. The book reads like a prolonged session between Jong-Fast and her therapist. She even hints to us early on that her title is a sham: “I wrote this book to help people (you have to say that, but it’s actually true), but also because I hoped the act of writing would make me less insane.”

Even so, the book has potential benefits for readers, doesn’t it? If she writes to bolster or restore her sanity, could what she writes help us, her audience, maintain our own?

I think so. As I read her words, she showed me her wounds, open and bleeding. She thereby helped me to rediscover and nurse my own. Though I can’t compare my mother to Erica Jong, nor my childhood to that of Jong-Fast, I do understand the pain of growing up in an atmosphere that may have looked ideal to others, but that was vexed by a mother whose priority was some mission other than good mothering.

Beyond all else, Jong-Fast illustrates that human relationships are messy. Mother-daughter relationships in particular can be complex and troubled. Regarding their mothers, daughters may feel conflicted.

How to Lose Your Mother presents its author’s feelings for her mother as the two sides of a coin that is shiny on one side and deeply tarnished on the other.

On the shiny side, she points out that being the daughter of a famous mother has its advantages.  She is, as she says, a “nepo baby.” Her education, her associations, and her career as a major-news-network journalist would have been unlikely if she were not the child of Erica Jong. The material pleasures she enjoyed growing up were a result of having a financially successful parent. She confesses,

I know how entitled I seem, complaining about my childhood. I mean, I never worked in a factory. I never wanted for one single material possession. Ever. Not once. I know how lucky I was, and am. I know how terrible the world is. But still.

But still—here is the tarnished side of the coin. In the spirit of Mommie Dearest, Jong-Fast launches some lethal jibes at her mother. She describes her as “drunk every day.” Self-absorbed and desperate to maintain her 1970s fame, she neglects her daughter and delegates her care to nannies. Daughter judges mother as “not as good a writer” as her friend Joan Didion. And now, in the nursing home facility where her daughter has placed her, she reveals that Jong “poops” in her bed and refuses to take a shower.

The most scathing jibe, though, comes in her appraisal of her mother as a failure. She writes,

My mother had been a negligent parent, and it was impossible for her to be otherwise. She was a damaged person, and she wasn’t a bad person. She tried her best. And it is true that sometimes your best is actually not good at all. Sometimes your best is terrible.

I get it. I was raised by a mother who provided for all of my needs. Though she was never famous or wealthy, I enjoyed advantages many children lack. I was fed, clothed, sheltered, and shielded from the dangers of the outside world.

Inside my mother’s world, however, her own brand of dangers threatened. I was subjected to physical and psychological abuses. Constant criticism, a persistent effort to snuff out any self-esteem I could muster, to convince me that my senses were unreliable. My perceptions were faulty.  I had to rely solely on her because I was defective.

Reading How to Lose Your Mother allowed me to understand the two-sidedness of my feelings for my own mother.  Did Jong-Fast love her mother? Yes. Did she idolize her? Yes. Did she also deeply resent her? Also, yes. She reveals that, along with being in awe of her mother, she was humiliated and embarrassed by her. 

I understand. While growing up, I loved and hated my mother. I longed for her approval and grieved for the fact that I would never receive it.

Now an adult in charge of her mother’s care, Jong-Fast continues to struggle to handle her conflicted feelings. She writes, “Even though I have spent my entire adulthood creating a different kind of life for myself, my head, my soul, my spirit—whatever you want to call it—is still stuck in the mire of my childhood.”

I regard her book as a challenge to me, and to all with mothers whose best may have been terrible, to keep coping.  Keep trying to rise above the mire.

Cover Photo: RDNE at Pexels