'Life, amidst death, has to continue': Molly Jong-Fast on her new book and watching her mother fade away
BBCBack in 2020, when my mother was dying, I feeling privileged that I got to be with her at the end, that I could help her on her way. I also thinking that losing a parent – much like having a child – is a moment that no one teaches you how to handle. For the daughter of feminist icon Erica Jong, that moment has lasted years.
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 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 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 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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