How to Lose Your Mother Audiobook By Molly Jong-Fast cover art

How to Lose Your Mother

A Daughter's Memoir

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How to Lose Your Mother

By: Molly Jong-Fast
Narrated by: Molly Jong-Fast
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Buy for $18.00

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER · A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2025

“With propulsive humor and perspective on her annus horribilis, Jong-Fast achieves the memoir’s transformative work of alchemy, arming us all with lines so good you won’t just want to underline them, you will want to cut them out to share.” —The Washington Post

“This raw, intimate memoir is a stunning portrait of difficult relationships and how we survive them.” —People

“Molly Jong-Fast’s memoir is mesmerizing, intimate, wise, unputdownable, crazily honest, heartbreaking, funny, illuminating—beautiful and painful at the same time, just like real life.” —Anne Lamott

From the political writer and podcaster, 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. Biographies & Memoirs Mental Health Awareness Women Memoir Heartfelt Thought-Provoking Witty Funny Authors Art & Literature Journalists, Editors & Publishers
Raw Honesty • Relatable Experiences • Authentic Emotional Delivery • Honest Storyteller • Profound Insights

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The raw and beautiful and heartbreaking sharing of a year in the life of Molly Jong Fast. I am moved beyond words in this telling. To be so honest and so generous in the sharing of this time in her life is something that will stay with me always. I thank her for it.

Outstanding in content and narration!

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Beautiful and deep. Very relatable and painful. Childhood memories that are too vivid and too insightful.

The whole story and Molly as the narrator.

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how someone perceives another person’s intentions makes everyone’s experience in the world a little different

What goes on behind closed doors

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Authors candid portrayal and she voiced the book. I will read her mothers book now.

Good read

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Loved this book. I laughed. I cried. I saw myself and my own f-d up family throughout its pages. My dad has Alzheimer's and my siblings are very difficult (to put it politely). Few people in the family are not "in denial" when it comes to Dad's affliction, just as in Molly's family. The loneliness she describes as being the only (relatively) functional person - that's something I identified with again and again. If you have a dysfunctional family, if you have anyone famous in your family (or just a little famous, like my own mom, Nancy McDonald)... this book is well worth the time. Loved it.

A Messed Up Family Just Like Mine

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