Molly Jong-Fast on the Fleeting Nature of Fame

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TRANSCRIPT

SPENCER BAILEY: Hi, Molly. Welcome to Time Sensitive.

MOLLY JONG-FAST: Thank you for having me.

SB: I thought we’d start our conversation today with what we could call “flight time.”

MJF: Right.

SB: So basically how you think about flying, and by this of course, I mean both Fear of Flying—

MJF: Flying and full-on in—

SB: Your mother, Erica Jong’s, landmark feminist book, and your own very much internal fear of flying.

MJF: Yes.

SB: Let’s start with your mom’s book, this totemic thing that had already been in the world for five years when you were born. How do you think about the impact of that book on your mom, on your dad, on your family, on yourself?

MJF: I often think about that book, and I think I talk about this in How to Lose Your Mom, like how, there’s a school of thought that it ruined her life and there’s a school of thought that it made her life. She was at the time, married to her second husband, a psychoanalyst named Allan Jong, who was Chinese, and they had been married for, I think, seven years, actually. When the book came out, she must’ve been 31. She was around that age. 

When you look at my mom’s life, there were all of these times when she’s clearly trying on different identities, and I think she thought she’d be a doctor’s wife. During the Vietnam War, they went and lived in Heidelberg, Germany, because Allan was worried that he’d be confused for someone who was Vietnamese and be killed on the front lines. They weren’t sending doctors to the front lines, but this idea had captured his imagination. I guess they were sending some doctors to front lines, but not child psychoanalysts, probably. They lived in Heidelberg, Germany. She did analysis in a different German city, and I think that was a life she sort of tried on. When the book became such a phenomenon, it changed the trajectory of her life.

It’s funny ’cause people come to me and they’ll say… I actually was talking to a friend of mine today who’s a really smart reporter for The New York Times, and we were talking about how… We were talking about our mothers—’cause both our mothers around the same age—and how that book actually did… She was saying that book changed her mother’s life and how important it was when she was growing up. I said that our mothers created a structure for us to exist—and she’s more successful than I am. She writes bestsellers, she covers the Trump administration, and I was thinking women like us didn’t exist before our mothers did things like they did, and our daughters could not exist were it not for us. So much of this feminism really is recent. The women who can have bank accounts and do the same things as men. This is a fifty-year proposition.

SB: It kind of coincides with the book almost.

MJF: Yeah. So there are a couple of things that happen: The pill is 1960; then the book comes out in ’73; Roe is passed in ’73; then they can’t get the Equal Rights Amendment passed. It is just a sort of seminal moment for women, and some of it is reversed and some of it is not.

SB: There’s always the classic, “in your parents’ shadow, you have to find a way out.” But in your case, it was not just a parent, but this book.

MJF: I had my mom [and then] on my other side, my grandfather. So my grandfather had written Spartacus and written April Morning and had written… a number of books. He actually, around the time I was born, he was about to write these series of sort of trashy novels called The Immigrants, which were going to be humongously successful and New York Times bestsellers, all of them, and end up being TV movies. They were sort of not classics, but they made him money and they also kept him in the zeitgeist in a weird way. 

There was always a sense that my grandfather really liked my mother ’cause she was famous and that, even though she was incredibly dysfunctional—and my father and my mother had this epic divorce that went on for decades where they were suing each other. My grandfather really had a special place in his heart for my mom, despite the fact that he was helping my dad pay for lawyers because they both had that magic potion of fame.

SB: Yeah, the glow.

MJF: Yeah. And nobody else did. So there was a sense in which they were very much simpatico despite the fact that my mother and my father did not get along.

SB: I think it’s fair to say your mom’s mom wanted to be famous. She was a painter who—

MJF: Right. She definitely wanted to be famous. I think so much of my mother’s particular pathology towards parenting came from her mother’s feeling that, had she not had these children, she could have been Lee Krasner, who is, by the way, someone no one fucking knows. That’s the great thing about all these people is, like, “Lee Krasner!” “She could have been Lee Krasner!” Who the fuck is Lee Krasner, right? [Laughter] Lee Krasner was married. Most famous thing about Lee Krasner is that she was married to—

SB: Jackson Pollock.

MJF: … Jackson Pollock, and that’s pretty much it. But my grandmother—

SB: [Krasner’s] paintings are having a bit of a moment now. I think it’s—

MJF: I guess, yeah. [Laughter] I still think I would rather have been born, but…

SB: You write beautifully about that in the book, the fleeting nature of fame. I’m sure we’ll touch on that multiple points in this interview, but it is interesting that these people who we revere in the moment, just ten, twenty, thirty years later, it’s like, “Who?”

MJF: Yeah, I mean, it is interesting as some people do stay famous, right? You could be Anthony Hopkins. Anthony Hopkins has been famous for many, many years. Decades. But most people don’t stay famous. Most people stay famous for a very short window of time. Part of that is because we get very bored with our famous people. Some of it is because we get angry at our famous people, which is what I saw with my mom, which was a totally fascinating— We make them like gods a little bit, right? They have a sort of magic power, which sometimes gets them elected president twice, but they also have a kind of—because they have this magic power—when they do things that are wrong or even just distasteful, they crumble. Again, this is like this idea of backlash, right?

I was rereading Susan Faludi’s book Backlash, which is, if you read it now—you should read it now—ecause you’ll be like, “Holy shit.” It was written twenty years ago. It is incredible. In some ways, what’s fascinating about it is, many of the things she considered to be powerful oppressors do not exist anymore. She writes a lot about women’s magazines. I came up through women’s magazines. Women’s magazines were where I learned to write. She has some pretty harsh words for women’s magazines, about the way they made women feel, the way they this, that. It’s funny because women’s magazines are gone. They don’t have power anymore. It’s over. It’s a paper tiger. So just really interesting to see how everything has shaped, and shifted, and changed.

SB: Bringing this back to your new book, How To Lose Your Mother, I was astounded to learn that your birth in this, I think it was this Washington Post piece, was framed as occurring “between pages two hundred eighty-four and two hundred eighty-five” of your mom’s book Fanny.

MJF: Yes, multitasker.

SB: This is literally like, almost positioning you within the pages of one of her books. Then literally you became—

MJF: It’s funny… Yeah.

SB: … the subject of, but—

MJF: It’s funny because I went to visit my mom at the nursing home before this. She’s at a very glamorous nursing home. Actually, we moved her to one that I think is nicer now.

SB: Than the one that’s in the book.

MJF: Yeah. We moved her to a different one, and I went to visit her because it’s near where I was going to read this audiobook. I said, “Oh, I just don’t have a lot of time because I’m doing this and doing that.” She’s very out of it, but she was like, “You’re really pushing yourself.” I said, “Well, I just have a lot of work to do.” She said, “I always overexerted myself, too. I wish you wouldn’t.” There’s something so dark about dementia, but I knew exactly what she meant and she knew exactly what I meant. There’s a strange connectedness to it, too.

SB: Your mom very often—I guess as you’ve pointed out—didn’t have a ton of time for you.

MJF: Yeah.

SB: Your dad once told you, “She couldn’t even spend one hour with you. The most she could do was half an hour.”

MJF: I use that quote because she said she was so obsessed with me. Then she couldn’t ever spend time with me. So I always worried it was me. What my dad did was he gave me the perspective to see it wasn’t me, and that was super gratifying. You have to remember, the 1970s and eighties were not the parenting we do today.

SB: Yeah, it was bohemian.

MJF: They just didn’t give a fuck. You weren’t supposed to.

SB: “Helicopter parents”? What? [Laughs]

MJF: People were smoking, we didn’t have car seats. It sounds bad now, but people didn’t really start caring about their children until, I feel like the late nineties, early two thousands. I could be wrong, but it seems like the vibe.

SB: Tracks. [Laughs]

MJF: Yeah. Not a great parent, but also it was a broad legion of bad parenting.

SB: Yeah. They didn’t have the tools from their parents either.

MJF: Two hundred years before that people were having kids to have them work on farms. Not to say that it wasn’t traumatic, I’m just saying we recently started valuing parenting as a society.

SB: Going back to “flight time,” in your new book, you write, “Obviously, given that my mom wrote Fear of Flying, this all feels [laughs] a little too on the nose. She wrote Fear of Flying, and bequeathed her fear of flying to me, but she was always, always, always on an airplane.” [Laughs]

MJF: It was weird. Yes, I did have a fear of flying. I think I’m pretty much better. I went to this guy, Marty Seif. I really did have a bad fear of flying and it came naturally. I write about it in the book. My grandfather was an importer/exporter, spent all this time flying back and forth to Japan, first on boats, then on planes. I think what happened was everyone just got crazy about flying. Maybe it was how it was flying in the sixties, not probably the golden age of aviation, but for whatever reason, everybody was superstitious and crazy about flying. I have these cousins on my mother’s sister’s side, including Peter Daou—I’ve now blocked him on social media, but he was the campaign manager for Jill Stein, okay, and also for Marianne Williamson—just basically everyone who I can’t take.

Anyway, he doesn’t fly. So they really did make us completely crazy in that family. I didn’t fly for ten years. Then, my husband was like, “You got to get on an airplane. Like, this is very weird. You got to be normal now.” So I was like, “All right, I’ll be a normal person.” ’Cause it is insane to not fly. It’s not… It’s one of those things where not flying doesn’t make you not scared, it just makes you scared of more stuff. I wouldn’t fly and then I wouldn’t want to go over bridges and then maybe the train, I didn’t want to go on the train. It kind of devolved. So I went to this guy Dr. Marty Seif, and he got me flying again. It was extremely stressful and horrible. The first couple of flights I took, I was like, “Oh my God, this is horrendous.” As I started flying again, it got better and better, and now I’m pretty good.

SB: It’s so interesting that [laughs] your mom’s book is called Fear of Flying.

MJF: She was terrified of flying. She always was afraid of flying. Even when she was flying all the time, she was still drinking, taking Valium, doing anything to keep… I’d be like, “You fly every week and somehow you still can’t—” Because, and this is something I learned in exposure therapy. I don’t know how interesting this is, but it’s interesting to me. And since it’s my podcast now [laughs]— I’m just kidding. But exposure therapy, the idea is that you have to feel the anxiety, but bodily feel it and walk through it to know you’re okay. I did that and found it was great. If you take Valium—I’m sober since I was 19, so obviously I’m not going to take a Valium—but if you take a Valium or have a scotch, you don’t experience the anxiety so you don’t get the exposure. So you just are a little stoned. You fly and then you’re a little stoned. Whereas what happens when you fly and you have this exposure therapy is you feel scared, you fly, you see it’s fine. Then next time you fly, you feel scared and you see it’s fine. Then next time you fly, you feel maybe a tiny bit less scared. It works. It just is not that fun and takes a while. [Laughs]

SB: In preparing for today’s conversation, I listened to an interview your mom did on Studio 360 with Kurt Anderson.

MJF: Oh, yeah?

SB: She says in it, “I had been schlepped around the world so many times because of that book.” just thought that was so, again, to write a book called Fear of Flying, and then the result of that is that you’re literally being…

MJF: Except she loved to travel. For example, I was supposed to go somewhere, I think it’s the first week in May. I was supposed to go somewhere for a couple of days this week or last week. I was like, “Well, I have these kids and I’m going on a book tour in two weeks and I really think I should just stay here and be here for these kids, and I just don’t think I can do another… “I’m sorry, I can’t do it.” My mom, you couldn’t ever fucking… Just be like, “I’m going…” There was never like a, “sometimes I’ll go, sometimes I’ll not go.” She always went, which I think she really could not sit in her own skin, which, I don’t know. I respect that.

SB: One other flight reference I wanted to bring up is that you, growing up, spent a lot of time on Pan Am Flight 1.

MJF: Unbelievable. I am still obsessed with this flight.

SB: Could you share?

MJF: Yes.

SB: Tell the listeners what this—

MJF: Do you know about this when you were?

SB: No, I had no idea. 

MJF: So I think actually a little bit of it is wrong, but some of my worst memories of it were during the first Gulf War when Pan Am would somehow also fly troops. Everything would be so delayed and it would be JFK to London, Heathrow to Delhi, and it was the same flight and it would do three stops or it would do two stops and it may have kept on going. It was sort of a later version of that Pan Am ’cause Pan Am had started with these flights in the fifties where they would stop different places.

I remember, flying to London back in the seventies, eighties was… It was just chaotic, like, really chaotic and you’d leave late at night and there would be all these people going to India, and often there would be lots of troops going to wherever. It just was a super anxiety-provoking late-night thing that we would do. Some of my most unhappy memories are waiting for this late-night Pan Am flight to go to London and also TWA, these flights, you know, airlines that no longer exist figure prominently in my childhood, those two, TWA and Pan Am.

SB: I just find “flight time” a fascinating subject and not only through the fear-of-flying element, but the way time shifts when we travel and the liminal nature of what it means to be in an airport. [Laughs] I found it interesting too, to learn during the writing of your new book, you listened to Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking on a plane.

MJF: So I love Didion, and every time I go to California, I feel like I have to… Oh, I have a story for you that is really, it’s a story that I don’t think I’ll write about it, but I spent a lot of time trying not to write about it. I had a connection to Quintana and I wanted to never write about it because the way I knew her was a way that you’re not really supposed to say you know people. Despite the fact that she had died of alcoholism, I didn’t want to write about it because you really can’t write about people you meet—

SB: Through that.

MJF: … through that. The rehab had connected us, but still it felt really dicey to write about it. I write about being sober. I’ve been sober twenty-seven years, but I don’t like to write about other people getting sober—except my mom because it’s fine. We’re at a rapprochement with my mom trying to get sober. I’ve been really careful. I had read Didion, I had known her. I had not known her well, but I had known her a little bit, I had known Quintana well, and I had really been careful, even despite the fact that they were both dead and Nick is dead and John Gregory Dunne is dead. Everyone’s dead. But I didn’t want to touch it. I don’t want to write about it. I knew Griffin a little bit. I really like him and his writing is, I think—

SB: Yeah. Wrote such a great book.

MJF: Yeah, such a great book. So I knew this “therapy book” was coming out, the therapy notes, and I thought, “I probably won’t be in that.” I’m in it on page fourteen as her A.A. sponsor.

SB: Oh, wow.

MJF: As Quintana’s A.A. sponsor. I won’t write about it because it’s not my story, but—

SB: It’s out there through that.

MJF: It’s out there. I was so good about keeping that secret for so many years. Then a friend of mine was reading it and sent it to me and I was like, “Oh, that’s me. God damn it.”

SB: How much were you thinking of The Year of Magical Thinking while writing this book? Because—

MJF: It was a template.

SB: … you really feel it.

MJF: Yeah, yeah.

SB: I’m not saying that there aren’t lines that, well, I mean there’s a bit of a Didion-esque.

MJF: Right, but it’s—

SB: It’s very you, but it’s about a horrible year.

MJF: Yes, a hundred percent. I come from writing novels, so I really treasure good prose. When prose [is] good… I am just, first of all—especially ’cause there’s not a ton of value put on it in our A.I.-dabbled culture. So when prose [is] really good, it’s pretty great and pretty unusual. I like to listen to books now. I’ve started listening to books. I’m dyslexic, so I didn’t start reading until I was maybe in, I don’t know, fourth or fifth grade.

SB: You hated reading as a kid, right?

MJF: Yeah. I wasn’t a reader. It’s funny, I have a daughter who’s a writer and she’s a reader, just a voracious reader. My husband, who’s an academic—or was an academic—also a crazy reader. I’m sort of the lightweight in the family. So I have two other kids, one who does classics, but I’m kind of lightweight, so I mostly listen to things just because also I’m really an auditory—that’s sort of how I process information. I’ll listen to the whole New York Times or listen to The Washington Post or The Economist, and actually it works better for me, but it’s definitely a better way for me to process information.

It’s so funny ’cause it’s like, now I do so many jobs that I am always very cognizant of what it’s like to switch between different, like, I’ll be on television, that’s a totally different muscle than—

SB: A podcast or—

MJF: … even a podcast, which you would think—

SB: … writing a… Yeah.

MJF: Podcasts you would think would be the same, but they’re not because a television is like twenty-five seconds or a minute. You can’t say things… Like on a podcast, you can caveat things, whereas you can’t necessarily do that on TV. But yes. Writing is totally different. I am just very aware of how different these things are.

SB: I did want to bring up television. So that’s a good segue. I mean, in some ways, maybe TV for you is the opposite of the airplane. It’s like the thing that has given you some of the most pleasure in life. You’ve written that, by your early twenties, you’d “watched more television than”—

MJF: Oh, I love watching television, yes, I love watching.

SB: … some people watch. Yeah, yeah. I’m bringing it up in all senses of TV. I mean, you grew up watching it to the point where, as I was saying, by your early twenties, you’d “watched more TV than some people watch in a lifetime.”

MJF: Yes. I love television.

SB: And some your favorite memories with your mom were like, when—

MJF: Watching television.

SB: Yeah. You would stay up late eating ice cream, watching TV.

MJF: Yeah.

SB: Now, full circle, TV is this thing that makes you feel so good, but now you’re on the other side of the screen. 

MJF: I do love television. I really do. I think it’s really fun. It’s funny ’cause, growing up, it was so naughty to watch television. It was like sugar cereals. So in my dad’s house, you couldn’t watch. You weren’t allowed to watch television if it was light out. That was the rule. It still feels really subversive to me to watch television. I mean, I do it absolutely. 

I watch a lot of C-SPAN. Why I love C-SPAN—and they are quite pleased with the fact that I am their biggest evangelist—is because I don’t—and I say this as someone who’s in the news business—there is a lot of information that is not available when it is edited. For example, we spend a lot of time on the news talking about politics and not a lot of time talking about Congress—like, almost no time talking about Congress. There’ll be congressional hearings that no one will have fucking heard any— Can I curse?

SB: Sure. [Laughs]

MJF: Anything about.

SB: Yeah.

MJF: So I find C-SPAN— And C-SPAN actually has a podcast, which is excellent, which is just, and you get to really hear, like, sometimes the right will get mad and say, “You cut that out of context.” You hear the whole context, [and] it’s ten times worse a lot of times. You’ll be like, “This is worse.” I really enjoy C-SPAN and I get a ton of information from it. There’s a certain, being able to just watch a hearing from start to finish without any commentary—and I shouldn’t say this ’cause I do commentary, but I’m so aware of what is bias and what is our own bias and what is… When I can just watch some hearing from start to finish or a congressional testimony or— I find it really fun, which is a sad testament to what I consider to be fun. [Laughter]

SB: This is maybe pulling back a little bit—but how do you think about television from a temporal perspective? What is “TV time” to you?

MJF: I like to go on television. I find it really fun going on television. I really like it. When it’s great, it’s great. When you are on, doing a hit where you’re getting to talk about something really interesting with some interesting people. It can be great, great. Or when you are, for example, like, I was on a couple of weeks ago with someone who was just saying something that wasn’t right. I said, “I don’t think this is right.” I pushed back on it. That kind of stuff when you’re in there to be able to defend values that you know are correct, that is amazing.

We were arguing about whether or not this administration was going after Harvard because of anti-Semitism or because of its authoritarianism. It is of course the latter and not the former. The former is being used as a cloak for the latter. I felt really glad that I got to be able to do that kind of thing. Sometimes, and I think this is a problem that the left has, sometimes it’s like “we shouldn’t go in spaces that are more mainstream, less left-leaning spaces.” In fact, we should go everywhere. We should go on every show. We should go on Fox News, we should go on Steve Bannon. We should go on every single—

SB: Pete Buttigieg has got that.

MJF: Yeah.

SB: He’s understood that.

MJF: Just go everywhere. Be everywhere. Go on Joe Rogan.

SB: It’s interesting you mention Joe Rogan, ’cause it’s not TV, although YouTube is sort of a new form of TV, but how do you see this line between what you might call the “virus of fame” and television or media? I’m asking this also in the context of your new book, which begins with the first sentence, “I’m the only child of a once-famous woman.” Your mom definitely had her TV moments, for sure.

MJF: Everything’s a lot more siloed, so you’ll have things like, for example, people who are famous to certain groups. You’ll have writer-famous, or even I was looking at these photos of these people who are going to be at the Met Gala. Some of these people are very, very famous, but I have no idea who they’re. It’s just much more siloed. Fashion people know fashion people and book people know book people. 

I wrote for Vogue, I’ve written for Vogue during different decades. There were decades in the nineties where you could write a piece or even any magazine, Vogue, Vanity Fair, anywhere, or you could write a piece and it might get published and it might not and might get killed. It might get killed right before it was about to be published. There just was a lot more of a barrier to entry. So you could write a piece for The New York Times and everyone in the world would read it, but if you couldn’t get in The New York Times, there weren’t a lot of other places. You couldn’t publish something on your Substack. You couldn’t connect with readers just by tweeting. There were gatekeepers. There are not the same level of gatekeepers [anymore], but there’s also not the same level of bang for the buck that there used to be.

SB: How do you think this is going to shift how we think about fame?

MJF: Not to get political here [laughter], but genuinely the fuck-up that started all the fuck-ups was never regulating technology, ever, and just assuming that tech companies would be good actors. There was no reason to assume that tech companies would ever be good actors. There’s no evidence to support that. So what happened? Tech companies used content to build bigger tech companies. Right? They said, “Fuck you” to everyone who is a content creator in every way. I feel like it’s like NPR and Exxon. The government funds Exxon with tax incentives, but NPR, you get like, point zero zero zero one percent, and every penny you get, NPR, “We’re going to punish you for it.” Look at the U.K., they have multiple newspapers. I mean, are they as stupid as we are? I think they may be. But the point is—

SB: Yeah. [Laughs]

MJF: So it’s what you nourish in a culture. And it turns out that tech billionaires are not, in fact, benevolent monarchs. They are just shitty human beings like the rest of us. So now we have a situation where we have a sort of broad tech oligarchy that does not have much interest in the mainstream media because it does not do what they like, and so they’re going to build rockets. All of this could have been prevented had Democrats had any interest in… Again, I say this as someone who is— I was saying the Secretary of State I was interviewing and giving her a hard time. I said, “I want you to be governor probably as much as you want to be governor, but I just wonder if you guys communicated a little better, people wouldn’t turn it off when you guys started talking.” [Laughs] I think media is in a tough spot right now. 

SB: It’s interesting. We’re talking about different levels of fame and I think those levels of fame have to also correspond to the time in which that fame took place, because what it meant to be famous in the sixties, seventies was different in the eighties, nineties, different in the 2000s, and certainly different now. We’re also talking about a specific type of fame, which is writer fame. [Laughs]

MJF: Right. Writer fame is its own kind of fame.

SB: I love how you write in the book, you go, “Being a famous writer is not like being a Kardashian. It’s not even like being a famous politician. First of all, being a famous writer means that people tend to know your name, but not necessarily your face. This fame usually peaks and ebbs, and the peaks occur with the publication of a book.”

MJF: It’s true. I’m not even convinced that being a Kardashian is so great, for any number of reasons, namely they can’t go outside.

SB: Yeah. The jewelry mugging in Paris, I mean, it’s just—

MJF: Right. Even just the not being able to walk down the street. I sat down after I did the audiobook things and went and had a burger in the 5 Napkin Burger in Midtown by myself. That’s something Kim Kardashian cannot do.

SB: Right.

MJF: There’s something not terrible about being able to sit in a café by herself and have a burger. I’m not convinced that that’s the best, [that] what she has going for is the best thing.

SB: Yeah.

MJF: She does have millions of dollars and her own jet.

SB: How do you think about your own level of fame now that some has come upon you? This is really, I would say post-2016, as you entered the realm of politics more.

MJF: I’m excited that I get to write and that people read my writing sometimes. What’s nice about being 46 and getting a little tiny bit of notoriety is that… When you’re 26—and I actually published a book when I was 19 and it did okay, and it sort of got people talking a little teeny, teeny bit. When you’re 46, you’ve been unfamous your whole life. It’s delightful to get a restaurant reservation. It’s just a delight, when you email or when you say, “Is there any way I could get— I know this is very tight and it’s a Saturday night and I like to come at six because I have to go to sleep at eight.” I love a restaurant reservation, I’m delighted. So in that way it’s great, if that makes sense. 

SB: It’s not impacting your life in the Kardashian-level way.

MJF: No, it’s great. The other thing I think that is important to remember is, I’ve been sober twenty-seven years, so I have a pretty organized life. I’m not single, I’ve been married since I was 23, so there’s not a ton of deviation that happened. So this is great. I have friends already, so I don’t have to go out and make my way in the world the way I did when I was young. So it doesn’t really change things, if that makes sense.

SB: Right. You’ve had a chance to grow into yourself in a way where fame was foisted upon your mom. Significantly younger. too.

MJF: I mean, she really wanted it, too.

SB: Yeah.

MJF: I think it’s fair to say, like, none of this—

SB: Well, I wanted to ask you this ’cause it’s interesting to me, like, your fame doesn’t seem… It wasn’t like the thirsty kind of, or, it’s more like coming out of the shadow of your parent—

MJF: Right.

SB: … and I guess turning to your childhood, I mean, you had not just a mother, but a grandfather who were these totemic writerly figures.

MJF: Well, they were and they weren’t, right? They weren’t the good ones. I always say Jacob Bernstein is my friend, and it’s like Dad is Carl Bernstein and Mom is Nora Ephron. That’s pretty good.

SB: That’s pretty good.

MJF: Yeah. Nora’s like writing Hollywood movies, big celebrity, famous people speaking at her funeral. My grandfather won the Stalin Peace Prize. He didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize. My mother, she was the head of the Authors Guild, but no one else wanted to be. It wasn’t like, “I’m Alice Walker’s daughter.” I’m not saying that she’s not great. She was so famous for her narcissism that it also did sort of chip away at her literary legacy.

SB: Right. She was kind of stuck in that first book, almost.

MJF: I think that’s correct. Completely stuck in her first book and a lot of the stuff written about her sort of first nicely and then less nicely sort of portrays that. Yeah.

SB: You write beautifully about what it’s like to be kind of perpetually stuck in a bad childhood.

MJF: Yeah, she’s so interesting. I actually really think… Were you trying to ask a question?

SB: No, no.

MJF: Did I interrupt you?

SB: Go ahead.

MJF: That was something that has occurred to me, I would say around [my] late thirties, early forties, was this idea that— Part of the problem was that I just couldn’t get out of it. And what happens when you’re 46 or when you’re somewhere in your mid-forties, you start to realize that you are about to be on the back nine. Maybe you’re not on the back nine yet, but all of a sudden, the years of—it’s going—you’re on the other side of it, right? I remember watching my mother go through this and not doing well with it. This idea that her parents were going to die, and then that was it. That, once they die, you are the next line of people who are heading towards the conveyor belt. I think for her that was very tough because she couldn’t, because of her alcoholism or because of whatever made her so alcoholic, she could not find meaning in her own life. So she found herself pretty panicked. Now, am I going to be panicked when I am full-on in the midlife crisis? I don’t know. I’m not panicked, exactly. I see where this is heading. By the way, it’s not heading towards being younger, healthier, and happier, in case you’re wondering.

SB: Just sticking on the stuck-in-childhood bit, therapy is this other thing of your life that I think’s been a real consistent [thing] and therapy, you know, your mom was sending you to all these different—

MJF: Yeah, child therapists.

SB: … shrinks growing up. You were even reading Freud as a kid.

MJF: Yeah. But I haven’t been in therapy. I went to Dr. Seif for my fear of flying, but I largely have been out of therapy for a couple of years, and mostly because I just sort of ran out of material. I just did. I also felt like, “I know what you’re going to say. I get it.” That’s not a value judgment on therapy; it’s as much a value judgment on me.

SB: Was writing this book its own form of therapy?

MJF: No.

SB: No. So how do you view…? [Laughs]

MJF: Wait, I just want to say, that’s a question that everyone asks and I think therapy is therapy. This book is twenty-six dollars. [Laughter] I am asking you to pay twenty-six dollars. If it’s my therapy, you won’t have to pay twenty-six dollars. I have to pay you. I think of it as, I want you to read this book because you are a daughter or a son or a mother or a father and, because you know what it’s like to have a parent who is slipping away from you or maybe you never had. And because you know what it’s like to try to do all this stuff, to have kids, to have parents, to have a job and you feel— And to see your own life is slipping away. That’s why I want you to buy this book. Because it’s twenty-six dollars, that’s a lot of money.

Even the audiobook is still twenty-three dollars. I’m just saying I don’t want to complain and I don’t want my editor to get mad at me for saying it’s a lot of money.People are like, “Oh, this book is really good.” I’m like, “Yes, because…” They came to me when I had a platform and were like, “You should write a book.” One publisher was like, “You should write a book about how women can stop Trump.” I was like, “That is a terrible idea.” That is a book that would’ve aged like milk in the sun. I don’t want to write a throwaway book. I want to write a real book that you can read twenty years from now. And maybe you won’t, but maybe you will.

SB: I read two of your earlier books.

MJF: They’re not as good. I’m sorry.

SB: No, they’re not.

MJF: No.

SB: They’re not. I’ll be— [Laughs]

MJF: They’re not as good. I know. I know. This book is good. I mean—

SB: And you wrote them at a much younger age.

MJF: Younger age. I think they’re not as good. I wasn’t as mature, and I also didn’t, it just wasn’t… I got smarter and I got much better at writing ’cause I wrote a lot.

SB: The writing is exquisite.

MJF: Thank you.

SB: Yeah.

MJF: I had to relearn how to write. I had all these children. Then I went back to writing. I had really good editors. I write a column once a week for Vanity Fair. But for years and years—maybe not years and years, but a couple of years—I was writing three or four pieces a week or five pieces a week. I was writing a piece or two for Glamour a week, a piece or two for The Daily Beast a week, a piece for the, you know, just endless. I wrote a column for The Atlantic. So I have just written a lot.

SB: Yeah, I mean, you read your book Sex Doctors in the Basement.

MJF: It’s not so good.

SB: Then you read How to Lose Your Mother—it’s a transformative shift as a writer, I feel.

MJF: Yeah. Thank you. Well, no, I think it’s true. I mean, I really learned how to write. That’s the case against publishing books when you’re 19 and 22, is that you just don’t write as well as you do as you get older. I mean, I also think I did a master’s, I learned how… I really learned by doing. I had this editor at The Daily Beast, Mike Tomasky, who’s now the editor of The New Republic, and he just taught me how to write. He said, “This is how you do it.” There are certain things about writing that’s mechanical that can be taught. And there are certain things about writing that is spiritual that—

SB: Yeah, felt.

MJF: Right. That cannot be taught. There’s certain things about writing that are just [about] having aesthetic judgment.

SB: Sex Doctors in the Basement, you do get to some pretty core territory stuff though, that I feel like is worth bringing up.

MJF: Right.

SB: There’s a moment where I was really gut-punched when you’re writing about how you basically turned to drugs, at least on some level because you wanted to steal back your life from your famous mother.

MJF: Yeah, and then—

SB: That like, you wanted a life that was about you, not about her.

MJF: Yeah.

SB: You didn’t want to be a footnote in her life.

MJF: A real adult-child-of-an-alcoholic trope is where you can’t be the star of your own life. There’s so much of that sort of bad child-of-an-alcoholic feeling that when you drink or take drugs, you’re like, “Oh, this is why they were so terrible to me. This is the best thing ever.” So I think that is for sure true. I wrote so much about getting sober and being sober in my twenties and teens, and then now I’ve been sober twenty-seven years, and I still feel… I go to A.A. almost as much as I humanly can, and I still feel very connected to being a sober person. I have a sponsor and I really do do the A.A. stuff, but I’m not as interested in my story because it doesn’t matter. I just feel like you can get off the elevator at any point if you decide to get sober. If you get sober, it doesn’t matter. Ultimately, nothing else matters, right? It doesn’t matter what you did when you were drinking during the, whatever, eight years I was drinking or seven years I was drinking. It doesn’t matter. It’s irrelevant. If your DNA is coded for drunkenness, it’s done.

SB: Yeah.

MJF: Yeah.

SB: It really also strikes me that it was just one month into rehab, November, 1997, that did this, that transformed it. I mean, obviously you had a lot more— It was a process post, but it does feel like there was this sort of Molly before Hazelden and Molly after Hazelden.

MJF: It took a while to get sober, and even though I was a month sober, but I was still a nightmare. Getting sober is sort of a process and you sort of experience it in different ways. I would say my first year I was pretty crazy, and then I started to get more comfortable in myself. There are some people who get sober and they are a little better off right away, I was not so well off. It took me a little while. I sort of need to be in the hospital, not in a hospital, but I was still kind of just fatootsed. 

SB: You get out of rehab, get married, have kids, you swiftly become a writer—eventually, now, one that has some fame yourself. I want to turn here to the journey where you went from being the “daughter of” to being the actual Molly Jong-Fast, the “Joan Rivers for slackers.” [Laughs]

MJF: I know. Well, that was a long ago, bad review from Kirkus, now I have my own good reviews from Kirkus.

SB: Yeah. I still think that’s pretty funny. Or The New York Times noting that you have this “weapons-grade Twitter habit”—not so much anymore.

MJF: Right. I certainly do.

SB: Now Twitter is called X.

MJF: Yeah.

SB: With hindsight and in the time we have left, how would you describe or how do you view your evolution as a writer, as a media person to where you are today?

MJF: What’s nice is that I absolutely know what it’s like to be the “Jonglet.” It’s nice to be able to be successful and to have people know who you are. I would argue, I haven’t won any prizes. I don’t have my own television show. Can I give you the list of what reasons why I don’t feel that I’m actually that successful? I haven’t won any prizes. I’ve never had a bestseller. I don’t have a television show. I’m just on a television show. I have all sorts of theories as to why I’m not as famous as, you know, why I haven’t made it. But it is nice, again, to get the restaurant reservations. 

Look, if I won any prize or had a bestseller, I would feel more legit. Maybe that’s bullshit. It’s not imposter syndrome. It’s like what’s imposter syndrome times a million? What’s imposter syndrome on crack? That’s what I have. I don’t feel like I’m particularly… [That] I’ve made it, but I think if I could just get a prize, like a National Book Award—if anyone’s listening to this—or any kind of prize, or also—

SB: It would not shock me if your book ends up on The New York Times bestseller list.

MJF: Listen, man. If it does, I will buy the paper and frame it.

SB: [Laughs] A little different than the book review your mom framed.

MJF: I was like, “You understand you’re on the cover of The New York Times?” She just couldn’t. But yeah. Oh, I would be delighted. The good news about being middle-aged is you are just thrilled when anything happens that is not something terrible, medically. 

SB: This is maybe a macabre way to end our conversation, but your book, ultimately—it’s more than just a book about your mom, and it is a heartfelt book. You’re brutally honest about her, but it’s also heartfelt. It’s also about this horrific year. At its worst moment, your husband gets this cancer diagnosis—

MJF: It was so bad.

SB: You write, “It was a week that felt like a year, one of those weeks that contained all the scary things you might spend your life worrying about, the things that might never happen.” Maybe just share a little bit about that moment and also just how time shifted for you in that knowledge—which, by the way, you’re also dealing with your mother with dementia in a care facility at the same time.

MJF: So dark… It’s funny ’cause when I was rereading the book, I was like, “Oh, I remember this so vividly.” It’s everybody’s story. That’s the reason why I wanted to write it was not because I felt better writing it; it was because I know there are a lot of people who go through having these parents who we, and looking at them and just being destroyed over what age has done to them. There’s nothing else to blame.

SB: Yeah. You can’t stop the march of time.

MJF: Right. That is, I think, what is meant to be, you know? They get older; it happens. It’s this brutal process of just the body, the flesh leaving the body. It’s just really dark. That was what I was trying to write about. And I think that is the relatable… I feel like you want books to… What I feel like as someone who wrote books in the nineties and then wrote a book now, is that what I wanted, if you were going to buy this book, to feel that I was honest with you, that I didn’t… It wasn’t one of those books where you always say, “And my greatest accomplishment is…” My mom used to always say, “My greatest accomplishment is my daughter.” There is no fucking way she ever believed that. Do I think she was happy she had a daughter? A hundred percent. Do I think that her “greatest accomplishment” was her daughter? No fucking way. It’s not even a feminist thing to say, right? I have three kids. I adore my kids. Are they my greatest accomplishments? I don’t fucking know. It’s an insane thing to say. They’re not accomplishments—they’re people. So I think you read the book and I have been honest. There’s no bullshit stuff, which I find… When I read a book and you could tell the person is being dishonest, it’s just the worst. Especially a memoir. So it’s honest. 

SB: Brutally honest, I’d say.

MJF: Right. I hope that there’s an opportunity in there to see that the bad feeling you feel about your beloved father or your beloved mother—or you’re not so beloved anyone—is normal. That we are all having that feeling when we’re looking at our parents. That is what I wanted to transmit, was that we are all having that feeling, that we are all having that experience of being all of a sudden on the back nine and being like, “Oh shit.”

SB: Yeah, there’s a sort of grief at play. It’s kind of like finding grace in the midst of grief.

MJF: Yeah. You feel the grief about yourself too. I used to be 26 and I didn’t even fucking appreciate it. I look at 26-year-olds now, and I am twenty years older than they are, so I could be their mothers. I am like, “Your skin is so soft.” It goes back, it stretches back. It doesn’t just dissolve into nothingness. So be 20, enjoy the skin, the elasticity that your skin has that it will not have in twenty years.

SB: Would you say there was something when you wrote the final sentences of this book that you were walking away having, not necessarily an aha like, “Oh my gosh, I just discovered this,” but what was your general sentiment or feeling as you kind of walked, you know, you turned the manuscript in?

MJF: I thought it was good. I was like, “This book is actually good.” Now, does that mean anything? [Laughter] No, but I thought it worked really hard and this book is good. I feel like you get to a point in your life where you just want stuff to be pretty good. When you do stuff, you want it to be good. Sometimes you do stuff and it’s not that good. 

For example, this morning I filed my column, I wrote four hundred words before I went to bed, I went and did Morning Joe. Between makeup and the show, I wrote another five hundred words. I filed it to my editor at 10 a.m. and I was like, “You know, it’s not that good. It has the framework to be good.” He was like, “No, it’s okay.” ’Cause there were a couple of things where I just had not been specific. For example, I had said, “Trump on the dolls and pencils,” because he said this thing this weekend about dolls and pencils, and so when you can get things, when things can be good, it’s great. It’s really good. So there’s a good feeling. I’m very into this idea that you can just chop wood and carry water and keep going and do the best you can. There’s a lot of satisfaction in that. And I felt I got that.

SB: Yeah. Doing whatever’s right in front of you, the best that you can.

MJF: Yeah, I was like, “This is good. If nothing else, this is good.” So, if that makes sense.

SB: [Laughs] Well, hopefully—

MJF: Better than my column this week, but you should read it anyway. And especially because this podcast isn’t coming out until when?

SB: June.

MJF: June. So perfect. So read my column. Yeah, Vanity Fair. It’ll be good this week.

SB: Hopefully you walk away from this podcast going, “That was good. That was good.”

MJF: “That was good. It was good enough.”

SB: “That was good. Pretty good.”

MJF: “She’s very limited, but—”

SB: “Pretty good.”

MJF: “… pretty, pretty, pretty good. Yeah. Somewhat limited, but pretty good.” 

SB: Thanks, Molly.

MJF: Thank you.

This interview was recorded in The Slowdown’s New York City studio on May 5, 2025. The transcript has been slightly condensed and edited for clarity. The episode was produced by Ramon Broza, Kylie McConville, Mimi Hannon, Emma Leigh Macdonald, and Johnny Simon. Illustration by Paola Wiciak.