Summer—even in Toronto—feels like beach-reading season, so I decided to set whither-liberal-democracy aside for one column, in favour of reviewing a juicy new book about a Jewish literary icon.

Why do I feel bad admitting to having viewed Molly Jong-Fast’s bestselling new memoir How to Lose Your Mother in this light?

The formula for a successful memoir in recent years has been for someone with an enviable-sounding life to reveal that actually, glamor is miserable. To be a prince, a supermodel, a pop star, a member of the Facebook inner circle, it might sound fabulous, but it’s all rather tragic. Celebrity gossip exists, as ever before, but reframed so that the celebrities have taken control of the narrative, and so that the gossips understand themselves as rather lucky to be plebs. These books elicit, in the reader, a sentiment I have referred to as envy-pity. Names are dropped, but for the purpose of conveying that even those who hob-nob with the finest have their low points. The dishy memoir as guilty pleasure is done. We’re all too trauma-aware for that now.

How to Lose Your Mother is Jong-Fast’s third memoir. It covers a genuinely awful-sounding year she spent caring for (or, as she interprets it, arranging care for) her mother Erica Jong, as well as her own husband, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in the midst of all this. She hops back and forth between terrible 2023 and other parts of her life, with particular emphasis on her relationship with her mother. Jong-Fast is, by her own account, famous-adjacent, an active anti-Trump presence on social media who parlayed this into punditry and now appears on MSNBC.

Erica Jong was and possibly is famous on a different scale, the author of, most notably, the 1973 novel Fear of Flying, a classic up there with Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. It is a true top-tier twentieth century novel, a must-read of the American-Jewish and feminist and general canon. In it, Jong writes about female desire and Jewish identity in—not to be trite—the way I think but cannot articulate. If you’re off to the beach and wondering whether to bring Fear of Flying or How to Lose Your Mother, I could not in good faith suggest you take the latter. But if you have room for two books, they would make for an interesting duo.

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Who is the intended reader of How to Lose Your Mother? I ask in part because it was much-recommended to me personally, for what I can only assume is my reputation for being the sort of person who’d be into Erica Jong. (Not inaccurate!) Jong-Fast mentions repeatedly that she has never read any of her mother’s books, so if you wanted to learn more........

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