Molly Jong-Fast Discusses How to Lose Your Mother, with Meghan O'Rourke

BPL Presents welcomes Molly Jong-Fast, the political writer and podcaster, to discuss How to Lose Your Mother, a ferociously honest and disarmingly funny memoir about her elusive mother’s encroaching dementia and a reckoning with her complicated childhood.

Molly Jong-Fast is the only child of a famous woman, writer Erica Jong, whose sensational book Fear of Flying launched her into second-wave feminist stardom. She grew up yearning for a connection with her dreamy, glamorous, just out of reach mother, who always seemed to be heading somewhere that wasn’t with Molly. When, in 2023, Erica was diagnosed with dementia just as Molly’s husband discovered he had a rare cancer, Jong-Fast was catapulted into a transformative year.

How to Lose Your Mother is a compulsively readable memoir about an intense mother–daughter relationship, a sometimes chaotic upbringing with a fame-hungry parent, and the upheavals that challenge our hard-won adulthood. A pitch-perfect balance of acceptance and rage, humor and heart, How to Lose Your Mother tells a universal story of loss alongside a singular story of a literary life. This is a memoir that will stand alongside the classics of the genre.

---

PARTICIPANTS

Molly Jong-Fast is a contributing writer at Vanity Fair, a political analyst at MSNBC News, and host of the podcast Fast Politics with Molly Jong-Fast. She is the author of three previous books. She lives in Manhattan.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meghan O'Rourke is the author of The New York Times Bestseller The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness (2022), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction and the best-selling memoir The Long Goodbye, both of which have been widely translated. In her cultural criticism, she writes about AI, grief, the body, and unpacks oversimplified cultural narratives. Her most recent book of poems, Sun In Days, was named a Top Ten Poetry Book of the Year by The New York Times; her debut Halflife was a finalist for Britain’s Forward First Book Prize. Both a writer and an editor, she previously worked as an editor at The New Yorker, Slate, and The Paris Review, and launched the Slate Audio Book Club, one of America’s first literary podcasts. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Whiting Nonfiction Award, a Front Page award, and other honors, she is a professor of creative writing at Yale University and the editor of The Yale Review. meghanorourke.com