Lion and How to Lose Your Mother

A few months ago I read Lion by Sonya Walger and How to Lose Your Mother by Molly Jong-Fast back-to-back. I enjoyed both of them and it was interested how they spoke to each other. Both “Lion,” a novel, though it seems it might be quite autobiographical, and “How to Lose Your Mother,” a memoir, deal with an overwhelming parent. How a child can be obsessed with a parent, how they can be so charismatic, larger than life, and yet just absent enough to create a great longing. How a child can really be obsessed with what the parent isn’t giving them.

“Lion” is like a memoir because it’s focused on one thing: the father-daughter relationship, and it leaves a lot out. While we get some other moments of the main character’s life, a worldly life, moving between England, Argentina, Peru, Los Angeles, it all comes back to the father, who is handsome, charming, and thrill-seeking. She captures the intense love a child feels for a parent in spite of a parent’s bad behavior and neglect. Her writing is economical but carries some magic. It enchants.

In “How to Lose Your Mother,” Jong-Fast is writing about a well-known figure, Erica Jong, and what she reveals is the woman beyond the headlines and television interviews, the woman behind closed doors, the woman who was a mother. It’s not a pretty picture. Jong seems to have been a mostly absent parent, but Jong-Fast excels in showing her captivating essence. I think the best parent memoirs like (I thought of “Wild Game” by Adrienne Brodeur) this walk that fine line of getting at how complicated these relationships are; they show what made their parents deserving of such fierce love while also recognizing how harmful some of their behavior was. Erica Jong is currently suffering from dementia, which presumably allowed Jong-Fast to feel comfortable publishing this memoir now, and those details of dealing with this descent were tragic, but also heartbreakingly funny.