‘My mother coined an expression for casual sex: ‘The ‘zipless f*ck,’ writes Molly Jong-Fast in her new memoir, How to Lose Your Mother.

‘Now think about being the offspring of the person who wrote that sentence. And pour one out for me.’

Molly’s mother is 1970s feminist icon Erica Jong.

Jong gained fame primarily as the writer behind the groundbreaking novel Fear of Flying. This semi-autobiographical work stirred up controversy upon its release due to its candid depiction of women’s sexuality. Jong became a well-recognized figure, making notable appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, gracing the cover of Newsweek, and forming connections with prominent individuals in society.

Now, Molly’s memoir reveals not just the reality of growing up in the orbit of a glamorous, sexually uninhibited woman, but her heartbreaking descent – and slow disappearance – into the prison of Alzheimer’s.

‘She would always say that I was everything to her,’ Molly writes in the memoir. ‘She would always tell anyone who listened that I was her greatest accomplishment in life.’

But, she adds, ‘I always knew that wasn’t the truth… I found her disinterested. Impossible to connect with.

‘I wish I’d asked her why, if she loved me so much, she didn’t ever want to spend time with me.’

Now, it’s too late. While Jong still recognizes her only daughter, Molly says she doesn’t remember much else – not her grandchildren, and sometimes she doesn’t even remember that she was once a famous writer.

As her mother slips away, Molly finds herself faced with a terrible dilemma: How can she come to terms with losing her mother when she never really had her in the first place?

Married four times, Jong was not really a woman’s woman, her daughter now admits somewhat guiltily (and ironically, considering her place in the second-wave feminist pantheon).

In fact, she says, she had trouble getting along with anyone who wasn’t a man she wanted to seduce.

Jong’s third marriage – to Molly’s father, Jonathan Fast – ended in an epically bitter divorce.

‘Later,’ Molly writes, ‘my mother admitted they had an open marriage. My father, when questioned about this, said only, “Yes, she thought it was open.”‘

Incredibly, both her parents moved out of the family home in Weston, Florida, following their split, abandoning Molly and leaving her in the care of her nanny.

Only after a year did Jong summon her daughter to New York, where she was shacked up with a wannabe actor called Cash.

‘She was always in love with someone,’ writes Molly. ‘More often than not, it was a problematic man, a “no-account” count, a married writer who lived in Brooklyn, or a drug-addicted B-list actor.

‘Between her divorce from my father (husband number three) and her marriage to my stepfather (husband number four) there were numerous fiancés. I couldn’t help but envision each one as a possible father.

‘It would take me years to understand that the worst thing you could do to a kid was introduce her to possible stepfathers on a daily basis. But my feminist mother was always looking for someone to save her, someone to get her out of her own head.’

Jong was often absent for days or even weeks at a time. But even when present, Molly recalls she was often distracted – ‘dreamy, head-in-the-clouds, and detached’.

Add to that a ‘staggering lack of self-awareness’ and her excessive drinking, and the picture is of a captivating, complicated woman addicted to fame.

‘My mother never got over being famous,’ writes Molly. ‘Even years after people stopped coming up to us in stores, even years after she slipped from the public consciousness, the virus of fame had already made her someone different.

‘Becoming normal like the rest of us, the journey to unfamousness, was for her an event so strange and stressful, so damaging to her ego, that she was never able to process it.’

Then the pandemic broke her.

‘When it started, she was her normal alcoholic self, not 100 percent but she would do things and go places.

‘By the end she was lying in bed all day drinking a bottle or two of wine.

‘An important caveat,’ adds Molly, ‘is that my mother wasn’t a mean alcoholic like my grandmother (who used to get drunk, and scream at everyone, and pull off her clothes on the crosstown bus).

‘But mom wasn’t in there when she drank… My mother wasn’t bad, she was just gone.’

Perhaps that explains why it took so long for her to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

That, and a fierce denial that anything was remotely wrong.

Molly’s stepfather, New York lawyer Kenneth David Burrows, had started to show signs of Parkinson’s disease and, even after the threat of COVID had long passed, the pair rarely left their Manhattan apartment.

Friends and neighbors kept coming up to Molly on the street, concerned, asking if her mom was OK. Her increasingly erratic behavior had been spotted everywhere – ‘At the bookstore, at the hair salon, on the corner. Everywhere I went, my mother’s condition followed me.’

One night, while out to dinner, the wife of a friend leaned over and told Molly she had something to say that might be upsetting.

The dinner companion then held up her phone, revealing an Instagram post featuring a photograph of her dead father.

‘Your mother posted a comment on the photo,’ she told Molly.

The comment was: ‘Neat.’

‘The woman looked as if she were going to cry,’ Molly writes.

Addressing her concerns with her stepfather, she was met by excuses and denial.

‘Look, Moll, this is a hearing problem,’ he would say; and, ‘Ah, Moll, you know she’s just thinking of her next book.’

‘But Mom hadn’t written a book in a long time,’ Molly writes in her own book.

‘And suddenly I was 13 again, begging my stepfather to get my mother to stop taking diet pills, or to have her slow down on the drinking.

‘Everyone told me I was crazy in that case, too. They would tell me that my mom didn’t drink too much; she was just tired. She was just passed out on the bed, eye makeup smeared all over her face, lipstick everywhere.

‘She was just working on another book. She was just under a lot of pressure. Ken would inevitably declare, “Once she gets her book done then she’ll be back to normal.”‘

This time, there was to be no ‘normal,’ and when Molly eventually found feces in her mother’s bed, she knew it was time to find a nursing home for both declining parents.

Ken died in December 2023. Jong continues to live in the ‘world’s most expensive nursing home’ on New York’s Upper East Side.

‘Like my grandmother, my mother will likely continue on for the next 25 years in a state of dreamy, distracted unreality,’ writes Molly. ‘She will become increasingly unreachable.’

‘My mother is just a body now,’ she adds. ‘Erica Jong the person has left the planet.’

As much as this sounds as though she might be bitter or angry at her famous mother’s neglect, Molly admits to being so close to Jong she sometimes lies in bed at night, unsure if she exists without her.

‘She created me and I enabled her,’ she writes. ‘But there is a paradox at the heart of our relationship.

‘As much as I love my mother, I’ve often found myself regarding her with feelings that are somewhat closer to the opposite of love.

‘My relationship with her is split right down the middle. I admire her, but I pity her. I revere her – no, I worship her – but I am mortified by her.’

And yet, Molly is still haunted by guilt. If she had been a ‘better’ daughter, she thinks, she would have taken her mother in and cared for her after Ken died.

‘But I wasn’t that daughter,’ she admits. ‘Did I wish I were that daughter? Maybe? But the main thing was that I had survived being her child. 

‘Sometimes you just have to put the life jacket on yourself first.’

How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir by Molly Jong-Fast is published by Viking