How to Lose Your Mother Quotes

“I was, unfortunately, part of that odd generation for whom sexual harassment was something you just sat back and agreed with.”
― Molly Jong-Fast, How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir

“Maybe the difference between a bad childhood and a good childhood is that you never escape a bad childhood. Years later you’re still trying to fix it.”
― Molly Jong-Fast, How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir

“I had spent my entire life trying to get away from the loneliness of being abandoned by my parents. I assumed this would somehow preclude me from mourning their deaths. Like with almost everything in my life, I was deeply wrong. You can’t pre-grieve your parents much as you might want to, or need to.”
― Molly Jong-Fast, How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir

“during the eighties it was much more common to just have children and ignore them.”
― Molly Jong-Fast, How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir

“Did this trip make any sense at all? Leaving Matt and his cancer, right after his father died? It felt cruel. It felt like something my mom might do. I’ve never entirely known how to be human, not really, but at least I knew that if any behavior or activity seemed like something my mother would do, I should probably do the opposite.”
― Molly Jong-Fast, How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir

“Harold K. Guinzburg and George S. Oppenheimer founded Viking in 1925 with the intention of publishing books “with some claim to permanent importance rather than ephemeral popular interest.”
― Molly Jong-Fast, How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir

“not long ago, my mom started disappearing, began dissolving into the whiteness of the background, like a line on a shaken Etch A Sketch.”
― Molly Jong-Fast, How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir

“You never grow out of your unhappy childhood.”
― Molly Jong-Fast, How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir

“Kellyanne was at every White House Correspondents’ party, behind every corner. Everywhere I went, I would look around and see Kellyanne Conway behind me, glaring. Was she following me? I told people I thought she was following me and everyone said I was crazy. But then, at a predinner reception, she walked up to me and declared, “You’re a mess.” Later, when she walked by, she laughed at me. I was feeling so depleted from Matt’s cancer and the huge question mark about his health, everything involving my parents, my mother. A few days before, Mom had called me and threatened to escape from the nursing home. No, I wasn’t able to snap back the way I used to. I took the early train home. I ate the blue cheese from the cheese plate, and I hate blue cheese. ••• I visited my mom and stepdad at the nursing home. Rooms 703 and 705. I brought Bucephalus the Dog and my younger son to distract them, and me.”
― Molly Jong-Fast, How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir

“She would always say that when confronted with her addiction. And being the addict she was, she would always just keep on drinking. I was a little child, so I was dependent on her—one of the things about being dependent on someone who was constitutionally incapable of being honest with herself was that she was also constitutionally incapable of being honest with me.”
― Molly Jong-Fast, How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir

“What happens to the tears you never cry? Do they get reabsorbed into you, or do they linger? Do those uncried tears continue to travel around your body, all pain, all sadness?”
― Molly Jong-Fast, How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir

“Sometimes when I was working on this book, I bristled at the whole project of this memoir: a daughter trying to come to terms with the loss of a mother. But I never had Erica Jong. How can you lose something you never had?”
― Molly Jong-Fast, How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir

“It would have been helpful to have a sibling to commiserate with, but I was my mother’s only child. Everyone told me she loved me so much, but I never felt all that loved. Later on, I realized that I never felt that anyone loved me.”
― Molly Jong-Fast, How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir

“One of the other ways I survived: I never let myself connect with other people.”
― Molly Jong-Fast, How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir

“Jon said, “Every marriage has a million unspoken resentments.”
― Molly Jong-Fast, How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir

“Imagine making your fortune on the world’s worst candy bar.”
― Molly Jong-Fast, How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir

“Grandma had been a painter and Grandpa was a drummer. But they weren’t really bohemians—they were Jews trying to create themselves again in this brave new world.”
― Molly Jong-Fast, How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir

“she was deeply, deeply unwell. And everything she did in her life—or in the part of her life when I’ve known her, from age thirty-seven to now—was done in the hopes of surviving her illness, which was alcoholism. And maybe even though things looked fancy on the outside, my mom was dry-rotting on the inside.”
― Molly Jong-Fast, How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir

“She was so trapped in her own narcissism that she wasn’t really able to fake it for a conversation.”
― Molly Jong-Fast, How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir