Dementia and ‘the virus of fame': Erica Jong's daughter maps mother's decline

Novelist and poet Erica Jong helped bring unvarnished female sexual desire into the literary mainstream. Now her daughter, writer Molly Jong-Fast, is mapping her mother's decline.
'How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir,' published by Viking on Tuesday, June 3, is about Jong's dementia and how Jong-Fast has cared for her 83-year-old mother, the author of 'Fear of Flying,' 'How to Save Your Own Life' and 'Parachutes and Kisses.'
The book comes amid a wave of so-called nepo baby memoirs from Tom Hanks' daughter, Prince Harry and Lena Dunham, among others. Jong-Fast acknowledges her place in the trend.
'It is a huge advantage to be the child of a famous writer,' she told Vogue. At the same time, she continued, 'mostly the world doesn't necessarily want you to succeed. You just have to work super-hard and you have to be incredibly kind to everyone, which sometimes I do, and occasionally I fail (at).'
In the book, excerpted in Vanity Fair, Jong-Fast reveals how fame warped her mother.
'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 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,' Jong-Fast writes.
She saw her grandfather, the novelist Howard Fast, suffer a similar fate.
'I never knew my mother or grandfather in the height of their respective fames, but I did know them at the end, when they were desperately trying to claw fame back from the writers who, they believed, had taken it from them,' she says in the book.
Jong-Fast's previous books include two novels, 'Normal Girl' and 'The Social Climber's Handbook' as well as another memoir, 'The Sex Doctors in the Basement: True Stories from a Semi-Celebrity Childhood.' She's also a journalist, podcaster and political commentator.

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