My mother was loved by millions – but here is the dark truth about her that I have never told anyone

‘My mother came up with an expression for casual sex:’ the ‘Zipless f*ck’, writes Molly Jong-Fast in her new memoirs, How you can lose your mother.

‘Now remember to be the descendants of the person who wrote that sentence. And pour one out for me. ‘

Molly’s mother is a feminist icon from the 70s Erica Jong.

The best known as the author of the pioneering, semi -autobiographical novel Fear of Flying – a book that caused a scandal at the time, thanks to the uncensored representation of female sexuality – Young was celebrated wild, with performances on Johnny Carson, a newsweek cover and friendships with the rich and famous.

Now Molly’s memoirs not only reveals the reality of growing up in the track of a Glamorous, sexually unrestrained womanbut her heartbreaking descent – and slow disappearance – in prison of Alzheimer’s.

“She would always say that I was everything for her,” Molly writes in the memoirs. “She would always tell everyone who listened that I was her greatest achievement in life.”

But she adds: ‘I always knew that that was not the truth … I found her uninterested. Impossible to make contact with.

“I wish I had asked her why, if she loved me so much, she never wanted to spend time with me.”

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

While her mother is slipping away, Molly is confronted with a terrible dilemma: how can she come to terms with losing her mother when she had never really had her?

Married four times, young was not really the wife of a woman, her daughter now admits somewhat guilty (and ironically, given her place in the second Golf Feminist Pantheon).

She even says she had trouble dealing with someone who was not a man she wanted to seduce.

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

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

Incredibly, both parents moved the parental home in Weston, Florida, after their split, left Molly and left her in the care of her babysitter.

Only after a year did young her daughter called to New York, where she was abolished 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 countless fiancé. I couldn’t help it, but imagine them as a possible father.

‘It would take me years to understand that the worst thing you could do a child had introduced her to possible stepfathers to possible stepfathers every day. But mine feminist Mother was always looking for someone to save her, someone to get her out of her own head. ‘

Young was often days or even weeks at a time. But even when they are present, Molly recalls that she was often distracted-‘dramatic, head-in-the-clouds and loose’.

Add a ‘stunning lack of self -consciousness’ and her excessive drinking, and the photo is of an exciting, complicated woman who is addicted to fame.

“My mother has never become famous,” writes Molly. ‘Even years after people stopped with us in stores, even years after she had gone from public consciousness, the virus of Roem had already made her someone else.

“Like the rest of us, the journey to impeccability, was an event that is so strange and stressful for her, so harmful to her ego that she could never handle 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 to places.

‘By the end she lay in bed all day and drank a bottle or two wine.

‘An important reservation’, Molly adds, ‘is that my mother was not an average alcoholic Like my grandmother (who used to be drunk and shouted at everyone and picks up her clothes on the Crosstown bus).

“But Mama wasn’t there when she drank … My mother wasn’t bad, she’s just gone.”

Maybe that explains why it took so long before she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

That, and a fierce denial that something was wrong at a distance.

Molly’s stepfather, New York lawyer Kenneth David Burrows, began to show signs of Parkinson’s disease and, even after the threat of Covid was long over, the few rarely left their apartment in Manhattan.

Friends and neighbors kept coming to Molly on the street and asked if her mother was in order. Her always irregular behavior was spotted everywhere – ‘in the bookstore, in the hair salon, on the corner. Everywhere I went, my mother’s condition followed me. ‘

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

The dinner coupling then held up her phone and unveiled an Instagram post with a photo of her dead father.

“Your mother posted a reaction to the photo,” she told Molly.

The comment was: “Neat.”

“The woman looked like she would cry,” writes Molly.

She went to her worries about her stepfather and was met by apologies and denial.

“Look, Moll, this is a hearing problem,” he would say; And, “Ah, Moll, you know she just thinks about her next book.”

“But Mama hadn’t written a book for a long time,” writes Molly in her own book.

‘And suddenly I was 13 again, my stepfather begged to let my mother stop taking diet pills, or to have her slow down when drinking.

‘Everyone told me that in that case I was crazy too. They would tell me that my mother didn’t drink too much; She was just tired. She was just fainting on the bed, eye make -up smeared everywhere over her face, lipstick everywhere.

“She just worked on another book. She was just under a lot of pressure. Ken would inevitably explain: “As soon as she is ready for her book, she is normal again.”

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

Ken died in December 2023. Young continues to live in the ‘Listest Nursing Home’ on the Upper East Side in New York.

“Just like my grandmother, my mother will probably continue 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.”

No matter how much this sounds like she might be bitter or angry with the neglect of her famous mother, Molly admits that she is so close to young that she is in bed at night, not sure if she exists without her.

“She made me and I have enabled her,” she writes. “But there is a paradox in the heart of our relationship.

‘As much as I love my mother, I have often found myself about her with feelings that are slightly closer to the opposite of love.

“My relationship with her is split into the middle. I admire her, but I feel sorry for her. I worship her – no, I worship her – but I am stunned by her. ‘

And yet Molly is still being chased by guilt feelings. If she had been a ‘better’ daughter, she thinks, she would have taken her mother and took care of her after Ken died.

“But I wasn’t that daughter,” she admits. ‘I wish I was that daughter? Maybe? But the most important thing was that I had survived as her child.

“Sometimes you just have to put on the life jacket on yourself first.”

How to lose your mother: a memoir of a daughter of Molly Jong-Fast is published by Viking