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lanewillson 's review for:
How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir
by Molly Jong-Fast
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
Molly Jong-Fast’s latest book, How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir, is further evidence of the one conspiracy theory I still believe to be true. That is the group of excellent writers who, in addition to creating magic on the page, read their works, thus producing an entrancing audiobook version.
Like most folks, I know Molly only from her work as a journalist, and as a commentator on MSNBC. This is the first book of hers I’ve read.
It’s hard to explain, thinking of a book that deals with the dementia diagnosis of her mother and stepfather, the cancer diagnosis of her husband, and the eventual passing of her parents, and the past that informed those experiences as laser-focused. However, the far from faint distractions of the other aspects of her life that continued during this time - her children, multiple jobs, including writing and television, and the logistics of life’s daily gauntlet- provide the perspective and proof of her dead-on aim.
One strange aspect of listening to her read her book was that her voice kept reminding me of someone. Just before I finished the book, I realized she sounds like Bernice Fish, Abe Vigoda’s wife on the short-lived Barney Miller spinoff Fish. (Played by actress Florence Stanley.) Although Molly’s generation may remember Florence Stanley as Judge Wilbur from the TV show My Two Dads. At times, Molly’s voice finds the cadence of a small-town evangelical preacher, if that small town were Queens or Yonkers, and the emotion she expresses rises to near poetry.
Like most folks, I know Molly only from her work as a journalist, and as a commentator on MSNBC. This is the first book of hers I’ve read.
It’s hard to explain, thinking of a book that deals with the dementia diagnosis of her mother and stepfather, the cancer diagnosis of her husband, and the eventual passing of her parents, and the past that informed those experiences as laser-focused. However, the far from faint distractions of the other aspects of her life that continued during this time - her children, multiple jobs, including writing and television, and the logistics of life’s daily gauntlet- provide the perspective and proof of her dead-on aim.
One strange aspect of listening to her read her book was that her voice kept reminding me of someone. Just before I finished the book, I realized she sounds like Bernice Fish, Abe Vigoda’s wife on the short-lived Barney Miller spinoff Fish. (Played by actress Florence Stanley.) Although Molly’s generation may remember Florence Stanley as Judge Wilbur from the TV show My Two Dads. At times, Molly’s voice finds the cadence of a small-town evangelical preacher, if that small town were Queens or Yonkers, and the emotion she expresses rises to near poetry.