A ferociously honest and disarmingly funny memoir about an elusive mother’s encroaching dementia and a reckoning with a complicated childhood.

'A gripping memoir about mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, loss and healing . . . exquisitely relatable' - Lori Gottlieb, author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

Molly Jong-Fast is the only child of Erica Jong, author of the sensational feminist autobiographical novel Fear of Flying. An exploration of female sexual desire, it catapulted Erica into the heady world of fame in the early 1970s. Molly grew up with her mother everywhere – on television, in the crossword puzzle, in the newspaper. But rarely at home.

How to Lose Your Mother is Molly’s delicious and despairing memoir about an intense mother–daughter relationship, a sometimes chaotic upbringing with a fame-hungry parent, and how that can really mess you up. But with her mother’s heartbreaking descent into dementia, and Molly’s realization that she is going to lose this remarkable woman, it is also a story of love, of loss, of confusion and of deep grief.

Honest, moving, sharp and funny, How to Lose Your Mother takes us behind the scenes of a fascinating and sometimes tumultuous family dynamic, revels in the gossipy details of Erica’s famous friends and enemies, and leaves us with a better understanding of our own most precious relationships.