Transcript: Molly Jong-Fast

An interview with the American writer and political commentator

Many women in Generation X are now finding themselves overwhelmed. The world is increasingly stressful, but our private lives are not much calmer, as we care for children and aging parents and spouses, stare down middle age, and mull over the legacy of previous generations of women. My guest on the program this week knows something about this — she grappled with all of these things, all at once, during one truly terrible year.

Molly Jong-Fast is an American writer and political commentator. She’s a special correspondent for Vanity Fair, a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, and the host of the podcast Fast Politics. Her latest book is How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir.

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview here.

TH: It’s so nice to have you on to discuss How to Lose Your Mother. It’s a literary memoir about surviving a really terrible year when the bottom falls out. Your mother is dealing with dementia, your husband is diagnosed with cancer, you have a sick dog, your stepfather has Parkinson’s. But it’s also about surviving a destructive dynamic. Your mother, Erica Jong, published Fear of Flying, a novel about female sexuality, in 1973. It sold more than 20 million copies. She became very famous in her early thirties and she coined the phrase “the zipless fuck.” You write, “think about being the offspring of the person who wrote that.” Set this up for listeners today. How did you think through the book’s influence — first on the broader culture and then on your own life?

MJF: It was published before I was born, in 1973. So I don’t know that it had a ton of influence … I mean, her success had influence on my life, but I’m not sure that the book itself had. I’ve never had this question before. My mom’s book, it made her, it affected her. She was different than she would have otherwise been, right? She became a famous person from that book. But by the time I was born, it had been five [years]. I was born in 1978. By the ‘80s when I was conscious, I don’t know how famous the book was, but she had sort of become that person.

TH: The fame, you write about it. I think a lot of people maybe have not had close proximity to fame. It does wane; it does go away. And for some people that’s easier than others. For her, it was not particularly easy.

MJF: I mean, it wanes for some people. Some people are famous forever. Not so many, but it happens. But yeah I think it was hard for her to not be famous anymore and to have to be a normal person like everyone else. It was a little bit traumatic. I also think that she had so much … She became this character who wrote these books, who was this person, and it was very hard. Sometimes I’ll ask people how they stay normal, and one of the things they’ll say is that they didn’t get famous until they were older or they always had people around them who would tell them the truth. And I think she didn’t necessarily have that.

TH: You write in the book about her being quite absent, sometimes negligent, self-involved.

MJF: I think some of that, not to — but 1970s parenting, it was a very different culture.

TH: Yes, it was. [Laughs]

MJF: It wasn’t like the things that we have now, where people are seat belts and staring at your kids and lots of cameras to record everything they do. That is pretty new. That’s a pretty new phenomenon. So as much as I think there definitely were mistakes made, I do think it was just a very different way to think about parenting. It was a very different way to think about what that means. So I don’t necessarily think that it was all bad.

TH: You don’t think it was all bad?

MJF: I think she certainly was negligent and there certainly were a lot of [mistakes]. But I think, in context, there were a lot of negligent parents. That was kind of how it was. And even, as an example, compared to a lot of the other people I knew who had famous parents, she was better than many of them. Which is not saying much. But, I mean, it’s real.

TH: One of the things I wanted to ask you about, Molly, is thinking about the last wave of feminism. I grew up around that. I consider myself a feminist. It’s a hard conversation to have, to talk about what worked with that Boomer feminism and what didn’t. And I think this book digs into some of the things that didn’t work. When you look at the Sexual Revolution and the role that your mom played in that, and how that has impacted our generation, for example, what do you think worked about their feminism and their ethos about sexual liberation? And what do you think maybe could be rethought at this stage?

MJF: I think we all owe them a huge debt of gratitude because the world that they occupied, they helped destroy. My mom was born in 1942. Women couldn’t have bank accounts on their own, they couldn’t have credit cards, they couldn’t have mortgages. So I think that world is gone, the world where you had to stay home with the kids and you couldn’t work. Where women were really thought of as second-class citizens. I think that is not so true anymore.

That said, I think that there was a humongous pushback. If you think of where we are as just a pushback to a pushback to a pushback, and you realize we have fewer rights than our mothers did — at least when it comes to Roe v. Wade — that’s pretty intense. So I do think there were a lot of things that that crew did that moved the ball for us. But some of the stuff, I don’t know. I mean, the other thing was they became kind of a little bit parodying. There were so many panels of them fighting each other. I was really in it and I found it to be … I don’t know how healthy [it was]. I think things kind of went off the rails a little bit.

TH: What about the Sexual Revolution culture? I think it’s important to have freedoms, for sure. But a lot of the women that I talk to are not that interested in casual sex. Promiscuity doesn’t always work out that great for us. And we’re in an age now where we’re rethinking some of this. How do you relate to that conversation?