How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir

 
　　本書作者茉莉・瓊・法斯特（Molly Jong-Fast）是知名作家艾瑞卡・瓊（Erica Jong）的獨生女，母親身為第二波女性主義浪潮中的新星，她渴望成名，把時間和情感都投注在事業和愛情上。作為她的女兒，茉莉的成長過程雖有保母、私立學校、奢華飯店、海外旅遊和名人圈，母親卻常常難以親近。作者描述自己「擁有特權，就像出生時就已經被送上三壘，卻只想出局回家。」這樣的童年，稱不上快樂。
 
　　2023年，正好是母親轟動一時的小說《Fear of Flying》出版50週年，卻也是母親失智的人生轉折點，而自己的丈夫又被診斷出胰臟癌。那一年，茉莉不得不將母親與繼父送往安養機構。她回顧母親酗酒帶來的傷害及其他性格上的缺陷，卻也回憶起母親令人著迷的魅力，那種迷人光彩讓她「幾乎比任何女兒都更深地愛著自己的母親。」
 
　　作者以坦誠、犀利的文字，近乎執著地剖析母親的性格缺陷，然而這本書最令人意想不到、也最精彩之處，在於這一切，包含她的憤怒、哀傷、坦白，都讓讀者不自覺地選擇站在她那一邊，同理她的感受，她在書中流露出的幽默感，有時尖銳，甚至黑暗，卻也讓人忍不住會心一笑。出版人週刊盛讚：「瓊・法斯特拒絕單一的觀感及簡單的答案，她勇於面對親子關係中，常令人為難的模糊地帶，成果令人驚艷。」(文/博客來編譯) 
 
書籍評論：
　　l   「(這本回憶錄)就像真實人生那樣，既美麗又痛苦。」——小說家安‧拉莫特（Anne Lamott）
　　l   「她的誠實、自覺與哀傷讓讀者始終站在她這邊。低調、不矯揉造作、帶點黑色幽默的筆觸，將人生中最糟糕的一年，寫成最出色的作品。」——柯克斯書評（Kirkus Reviews）

＂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.

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