Latest news with #MollyJongFast
Yahoo
17-07-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump's Epstein crisis explodes: Fallout triggers MAGA revolt & plunges admin into chaos
MSNBC's Ari Melber reports on the escalating MAGA meltdown and internal crisis sparked by President Trump's DOJ and its handling of the Epstein files, as Trump continues to attempt to squash the story. Former SDNY prosecutor Maya Wiley and Vanity Fair's Molly Jong-Fast join to discuss. (Subscribe to Ari's YouTube now: Solve the daily Crossword
Daily Mail
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
My mom was an icon loved by millions - but here's the dark truth about her I've never told anyone
'My mother coined an expression for casual sex: 'The 'zipless f*ck,' writes Molly Jong-Fast in her new memoir, How to Lose Your Mother. 'Now think about being the offspring of the person who wrote that sentence. And pour one out for me.' Molly's mother is 1970s feminist icon Erica Jong. Best known as the author of the seminal, semi-autobiographical novel Fear of Flying - a book that caused a scandal at the time, thanks to its uncensored portrayal of female sexuality - Jong was wildly celebrated, with appearances on Johnny Carson, a Newsweek cover and friendships with the rich and famous. Now, Molly's memoir reveals not just the reality of growing up in the orbit of a glamorous, sexually uninhibited woman, but her heartbreaking descent - and slow disappearance - into the prison of Alzheimer's. 'She would always say that I was everything to her,' Molly writes in the memoir. 'She would always tell anyone who listened that I was her greatest accomplishment in life.' But, she adds, 'I always knew that wasn't the truth… I found her disinterested. Impossible to connect with. 'I wish I'd asked her why, if she loved me so much, she didn't ever want to spend time with me.' Now, it's too late. While Jong still recognizes her only daughter, Molly says she doesn't remember much else - not her grandchildren, and sometimes she doesn't even remember that she was once a famous writer. As her mother slips away, Molly finds herself faced with a terrible dilemma: How can she come to terms with losing her mother when she never really had her in the first place? Married four times, Jong was not really a woman's woman, her daughter now admits somewhat guiltily (and ironically, considering her place in the second-wave feminist pantheon). In fact, she says, she had trouble getting along with anyone who wasn't a man she wanted to seduce. Jong's third marriage - to Molly's father, Jonathan Fast - ended in an epically bitter divorce. 'Later,' Molly writes, 'my mother admitted they had an open marriage. My father, when questioned about this, said only, "Yes, she thought it was open."' Incredibly, both her parents moved out of the family home in Weston, Florida, following their split, abandoning Molly and leaving her in the care of her nanny. Only after a year did Jong summon her daughter to New York, where she was shacked up with a wannabe actor called Cash. 'She was always in love with someone,' writes Molly. 'More often than not, it was a problematic man, a "no-account" count, a married writer who lived in Brooklyn, or a drug-addicted B-list actor. 'Between her divorce from my father (husband number three) and her marriage to my stepfather (husband number four) there were numerous fiancés. I couldn't help but envision each one as a possible father. 'It would take me years to understand that the worst thing you could do to a kid was introduce her to possible stepfathers on a daily basis. But my feminist mother was always looking for someone to save her, someone to get her out of her own head.' Jong was often absent for days or even weeks at a time. But even when present, Molly recalls she was often distracted - 'dreamy, head-in-the-clouds, and detached'. Add to that a 'staggering lack of self-awareness' and her excessive drinking, and the picture is of a captivating, complicated woman addicted to fame. 'My mother never got over being famous,' writes Molly. 'Even years after people stopped coming up to us in stores, even years after she slipped from the public consciousness, the virus of fame had already made her someone different. 'Becoming normal like the rest of us, the journey to unfamousness, was for her an event so strange and stressful, so damaging to her ego, that she was never able to process it.' Then the pandemic broke her. 'When it started, she was her normal alcoholic self, not 100 percent but she would do things and go places. 'By the end she was lying in bed all day drinking a bottle or two of wine. 'An important caveat,' adds Molly, 'is that my mother wasn't a mean alcoholic like my grandmother (who used to get drunk, and scream at everyone, and pull off her clothes on the crosstown bus). 'But mom wasn't in there when she drank... My mother wasn't bad, she was just gone.' Perhaps that explains why it took so long for her to be diagnosed with Alzheimer's. That, and a fierce denial that anything was remotely wrong. Molly's stepfather, New York lawyer Kenneth David Burrows, had started to show signs of Parkinson's disease and, even after the threat of COVID had long passed, the pair rarely left their Manhattan apartment. Friends and neighbors kept coming up to Molly on the street, concerned, asking if her mom was OK. Her increasingly erratic behavior had been spotted everywhere - 'At the bookstore, at the hair salon, on the corner. Everywhere I went, my mother's condition followed me.' One night, while out to dinner, the wife of a friend leaned over and told Molly she had something to say that might be upsetting. The dinner companion then held up her phone, revealing an Instagram post featuring a photograph of her dead father. 'Your mother posted a comment on the photo,' she told Molly. The comment was: 'Neat.' 'The woman looked as if she were going to cry,' Molly writes. Addressing her concerns with her stepfather, she was met by excuses and denial. 'Look, Moll, this is a hearing problem,' he would say; and, 'Ah, Moll, you know she's just thinking of her next book.' 'But Mom hadn't written a book in a long time,' Molly writes in her own book. 'And suddenly I was 13 again, begging my stepfather to get my mother to stop taking diet pills, or to have her slow down on the drinking. 'Everyone told me I was crazy in that case, too. They would tell me that my mom didn't drink too much; she was just tired. She was just passed out on the bed, eye makeup smeared all over her face, lipstick everywhere. 'She was just working on another book. She was just under a lot of pressure. Ken would inevitably declare, "Once she gets her book done then she'll be back to normal."' This time, there was to be no 'normal,' and when Molly eventually found feces in her mother's bed, she knew it was time to find a nursing home for both declining parents. Ken died in December 2023. Jong continues to live in the 'world's most expensive nursing home' on New York's Upper East Side. 'Like my grandmother, my mother will likely continue on for the next 25 years in a state of dreamy, distracted unreality,' writes Molly. 'She will become increasingly unreachable.' 'My mother is just a body now,' she adds. 'Erica Jong the person has left the planet.' As much as this sounds as though she might be bitter or angry at her famous mother's neglect, Molly admits to being so close to Jong she sometimes lies in bed at night, unsure if she exists without her. 'She created me and I enabled her,' she writes. 'But there is a paradox at the heart of our relationship. 'As much as I love my mother, I've often found myself regarding her with feelings that are somewhat closer to the opposite of love. 'My relationship with her is split right down the middle. I admire her, but I pity her. I revere her - no, I worship her - but I am mortified by her.' And yet, Molly is still haunted by guilt. If she had been a 'better' daughter, she thinks, she would have taken her mother in and cared for her after Ken died. 'But I wasn't that daughter,' she admits. 'Did I wish I were that daughter? Maybe? But the main thing was that I had survived being her child. 'Sometimes you just have to put the life jacket on yourself first.'
New York Times
14-06-2025
- Health
- New York Times
A New Story Is Emerging About Dementia
If you've heard about Molly Jong-Fast's new memoir, 'How to Lose Your Mother,' it won't surprise you that a great many readers are coming for the juicy matricidal takedown of the feminist icon Erica Jong. I came for the dementia. Ms. Jong-Fast bracingly challenges the sentimental conventions of so many family stories, refusing to sacrifice her story to preserve appearances. The telling of her mother's cognitive decline, however, follows a pattern that shapes how we write and even talk about dementia, a condition that affects 57 million people worldwide. It's been described as the tragedy narrative. Perhaps you've noticed it, too. In its various iterations across books and films, the dementia tragedy narrative tells a story of inexorable decline and universal diminishment, in which the afflicted person steadily vacates her body until she becomes essentially absent. While this process may include moments of lucidity or levity, nothing substantially positive, life-giving or new can emerge for the person or her family and friends — because the person as person is disappearing. 'My mother is just a body now,' Ms. Jong-Fast writes. 'She has dementia. She has breath and hair and pretty blue eyes but Erica Jong the person has left the planet.' She is 'dissolving,' 'slipping away,' 'a faint fragment,' 'an echo,' 'a zombie.' The trouble with this well established approach is not that the tragedy narrative is completely false. There are indeed losses and suffering associated with dementia, experiences that confound and aggrieve, and these descriptions resonate with many people's own experiences. The problem is that narrating them in this manner, turning a multidimensional phenomenon into a story of unidirectional decline and disappearance, reinforces stigma around cognitive disability. And the notion that people are gone before they are dead directly harms the care they receive, exactly when they need it most. People with dementia are extremely vulnerable to being abused and neglected, financially drained (even just to get necessary care), improperly medicated and restrained, infantilized, ignored and socially abandoned. The tragedy narrative obscures the reality that a significant measure of their suffering emerges not from the condition alone, but from the social response to it — the part of the situation we are most able to fix. These assumptions are easy to find. They're sprinkled liberally throughout everyday language and metaphors, appearing anytime dementia is imagined as ceaseless suffering that turns people into shells, husks, the living dead or at least less 'real' versions of themselves. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
BBC News
11-06-2025
- Health
- BBC News
'Life, amidst death, has to continue': Molly Jong-Fast on her new book and watching her mother fade away
BBC Special Correspondent Katty Kay chats with author Molly Jong-Fast about her memoir, How to Lose Your Mother, which tackles the life, legacy, and decline of her mother, Erica Jong. The death of a mother or father is one of the things we don't talk about much in modern life, maybe because it scares us. But it's a universal reality. Nearly all of us will go through it at some point. Molly Jong-Fast is a political commentator and writer for Vanity Fair who has just written a new memoir, How to Lose Your Mother. The book is Jong-Fast's account of her mother and feminist author Erica Jong's descent into dementia, which began the same year that Jong-Fast's husband, professor Matthew Adlai Greenfield, was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. The book is an honest, emotional and at times funny account of how Jong-Fast got through that horrible time. Not only was she handling her mother's cognitive decline, Jong-Fast's stepfather was diagnosed with Parkinson's, the world was dealing with Covid and everyone in her orbit was under one roof, including an elderly dog with his own health problems. These are heavy topics, but we found moments of laughter, too, emblematic of Jong-Fast's style. In her memoir, the author explores lying to her children about their father's health, referring to a growth on his pancreas as a "mass", because, "a 'mass' could be anything – a group of people, a group of blood vessels, a group of cockapoos meeting in Central Park for a cockapoo meetup". I really enjoyed this conversation. Her lessons about handling loss and grief, facing the legacy of her mother's fame and the difficult decisions that come with ageing parents are things I think we can all learn from. Watch (or read) more of our discussion below. Below is an excerpt from our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity. Katty Kay: When my mum died, I remember thinking that I've had training up the wazoo for everything in my life, but nobody's given me the guidebook for this. Nobody's said, as your parents get older, they're going to need their diapers changed or that you're going to need to think about the money – let alone anybody helping you with all of the emotions. I'm so glad you wrote this book to help people, but why is it that we've gotten to this position where something that almost everybody goes through, we're left kind of clueless when it comes to it? Molly Jong-Fast: I think there's a lot of shame about getting older. It's why I talk about being sober all the time; I want to destigmatise alcoholism and that's how I feel about this to a certain extent. People don't want to talk about it. People don't want to get older. It's really scary. It only goes one direction and you can't get off. You don't get to skip birthdays. It's just this endless march towards death and nobody knows what happens after you die. What I think was so interesting about this whole experience was that it gets you into this conversation of: Why are we here? What is the point of all of this? Why are we on this planet and what should we be trying to grab from this human experience before it's too late? KK: Having now gone through the last few years and written this book, do you feel like you have lessons to impart? MJF: Because I got sober at 19, I saw the incredible benefit of being able to look at my experience and show it to other people. I got that if you can go through something and share that experience with someone else, they can be helped by it. It's almost Jungian; there's a collective suffering that can be shared and lessened. The thing that I always try to say, especially with my kids, is to not feel bad about stuff. The rest of the world can make you feel bad, OK? But don't make yourself feel bad about things. The other thing I say to people is to just do the best you can. This is not going to look the way you want it to look. Maybe it will! And that's great, too. But just because things don't look the way you want them to doesn't mean it's not the way it's supposed to look. KK: I think some people looking at what you went through would think 'I couldn't bear that.' But you have lovely moments in the book where you write about taking the kids on spring break because it's spring break. And you have to buy groceries and you have to pick them up from college. And that life – amidst death – has to continue. MJF: There's this funny moment, I don't know if this made it into the book, but my husband and I had this thing where his father died and then, two weeks later, my stepfather's sister died – and we were at the same, very small funeral home in Connecticut. And the people who own the funeral home come up to us and they're like [makes a shocked face]. We saw that it was very dark – it was not a great year – but we saw the humour in it. I do think the wonderful thing – and I think you see this in much worse stories of people who are in camps or the stories of people who are in wars – is that your focus becomes very narrow and everything becomes a binary. You either can do this or you can do that. And there's something very clarifying about the binary, which I don't think is a bad thing. KK: You start in the book by saying you have this incredibly intense relationship with your mother and you're part of her and she's part of you. But it becomes pretty clear that the relationship is complicated and not as close as you had wanted it to be and that your mother had incredibly narcissistic tendencies when you were growing up. I think that, for so many people who go through this process, that makes what you have written even more important, because so many people don't have that loving, easy relationship with their parents, and when that moment comes they feel a terrible sense of guilt. MJF: I would guess that, on average, people have worse relationships with their parents than we think they do. Our generation is just going through this period with these parents who we're losing and there is a sense when I talk to these people that they feel guilty. They're sort of stuck and feeling bad. And I definitely felt guilty. I put this in the book, but my husband's shrink says, 'Sometimes, when you have narcissistic parents, you feel worse that it didn't work out.' KK: What did you feel guilty about when your mother started to get dementia and you made the decision to move her into a home? MJF: In my ideal world, my mother would not be an alcoholic and I would move her into my house and she'd be painting and writing poetry and maybe [be] a little dotty. But she'd live in my house. So, I felt very bad. It was not how I wanted it to go. But I also felt that my feeling bad was a useful thing for people to see. I'm not just doing this because I'm an exhibitionist. I'm doing it because I really do think that when you have a relationship that isn't what you want and then you suffer from it, you don't have to. And I'm saying, 'I did it and you don't have to,' is sort of the goal. –-
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Vogue
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
In Her New Memoir, ‘How to Lose Your Mother,' Molly Jong-Fast Charts a Bold New Path By Examining Old Family Ties
As a child, writer and podcaster Molly Jong-Fast tried to squeeze as much time and attention out of her work-focused, celebrity-obsessed mom, Fear of Flying author Erica Jong, as possible, describing Jong's regard as 'fairy dust.' 'Growing up, I wondered how such a glamorous person had birthed me,' Jong-Fast recalls. Yet the real heart of Jong-Fast's new memoir, How to Lose Your Mother (out June 3 from Viking), is her attempt to come to terms with the now-83-year-old Jong's dementia. She was diagnosed in 2023—the same year that Jong-Fast's husband learned he had a rare cancer—and she moved to a Manhattan nursing home earlier this year. 'The tragedy: now I could get her attention, but of course now I didn't want it,' Jong-Fast writes. Yet she resists the temptation to tie either of her family members' medical crises up with a bow, freely admitting that she's still working to define and understand her relationship with her mother, even as she becomes a caretaker for the woman who never quite managed to care for her in the ways she needed. Through all the chaos that Jong's past choices and current illness have unleashed on her life, Jong-Fast remains staunchly committed to the project being her own person: 'I am sober and sort of sane and not my mother,' she writes—words that feel almost like a guiding mantra for the book. Here, Jong-Fast speaks to Vogue about the baby-of-boomer blues, what she learned from her mother, and how she'd feel about being the subject of her own child's work. Vogue: Do you have any favorite parent-child narratives that helped prepare you to tell this story? Molly Jong-Fast: Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking is a great example of how to write about a really bad year in a way that other people can connect with and that can serve as a template for the experience. That was certainly a model. Because I come from the novelistic tradition, I've always sort of connected with prose in a way that I think a lot of political writers aren't as interested in, because it's just sort of a different way of looking at writing. That was a book that I was very much struck by, but there's also Girl, Interrupted and so many others; memoir is an amazing genre that lends itself to every machination of telling your story in a weird, feminist way.
