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 o

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