Another Covidian tells on herself

Five years later, the Covidians keep telling us how selfish they were – and are.

The newest, ugliest example comes in the wretched person of Molly Jong-Fast, and her wretched memoir mocking her 83-year-old mother, the novelist Erica Jong.

Jong-Fast is the lefty media talking head who spent 2020 demanding lockdowns and refusing to leave her apartment because she was terrified of Covid. In December 2020, she posted, “We have 310,000 dead1 because we are a country of morons.”2 She spent 2021 blowing the trumpets for mRNA jabs.

Typical MSNBC commentator, in other words.

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Jong-Fast pops up in PANDEMIA for her (now-deleted) prediction that Covid might kill 23 million Americans. She and I had a couple of run-ins on Twitter back in the day.

So when I saw she had published a memoir that, to quote the novelist Jennifer Weiner, “depicts Erica Jong, now suffering from dementia, as a narcissist, a drunk, a disinterested parent…” I decided to take a look.

Amazingly, Weiner’s description understates how terribly Jong-Fast behaves — in her memoir and in life — to Erica Jong, who in 1973 became famous overnight for her novel “Fear of Flying.”

The specifics are worth examining. For Jong-Fast’s book reveals a profound personal ingratitude, the suffocating selfishness that seems to animate so much contemporary leftism.

The rules-are-for-thee-not-for-me “limousine liberal” — these days updated to the private-jet flying climate change advocate — has long been a caricature. Rightly so. Al Gore was happy taxing carbon, even happier to use 20 times as much electricity as the average American.

But Jong-Fast’s moral rot goes deeper. It’s personal.

Her charity doesn’t begin at home. It ends there.

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(Fear of Flying is bad. Fear of Having a More Successful Mother is much worse.)

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“How to Lose Your Mother” is petty and mean almost beyond belief. Here’s how Molly Jong-Fast describes her mother early on:

She got up. Her silk robe was open and you could see her naked body. (She was never good at keeping her robe closed — this was true both metaphorically and literally.)

…We sat down at the dining room table. I tried not to look at her boob, which was unfortunately somewhat visible. I have always spent way too much time thinking about getting older and about how ruthless the march of time was on the body.

Try to process these few seconds.

It’s not just that Molly Jong-Fast is disgusted by a glimpse of her mother’s aged breast. Jong-Fast doesn’t give Erica Jong even the basic kindness of helping tighten her robe. Instead she luxuriates in her disgust. Then she centers herself in it.

I have always spent way too much time…

I, I, I. Me, me, me.

The selfishness pops up on practically every page.

Erica Jong, not Molly Jong-Fast, is the victim here. Erica Jong is losing herself to dementia, being forced to move into a nursing home.

Erica Jong, not Molly Jong-Fast, is dying.

Yet throughout this book, the reader looks in vain for evidence that Molly Jong-Fast cares about her mother’s subjective experience, or is even interested in it.

Erica Jong is a problem for Molly, and the fact that Erica Jong is a problem for Molly makes Molly sad — for Molly. It doesn’t make her change her behavior, it just makes her aware she is behaving badly, an awareness she doesn’t like. As she tells us.

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(Lucky me)

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Molly Jong-Fast excuses herself by claiming that Erica Jong was selfish when Molly was a kid. Though as Jennifer Weiner noted, Molly herself suggests otherwise throughout the book:

If her mother’s indifference was leavened by sojourns in Venice and shopping sprees at Bergdorf’s or nights in her bed, just the two of them, eating ice cream and watching TV, in Jong-Fast’s opinion, there was still neglect.

Molly Jong-Fast’s biggest specific complaints about her mother are that she drank too much and that she gave long and embarrassing toasts. (The toasts come up repeatedly.) Oh, and that she told Molly Jong-Fast her estate would be valuable, but apparently it won’t. (Those complaints come up repeatedly too.)

Throughout the memoir, Molly refers to Erica Jong as an alcoholic.

It seems more accurate to say Erica Jong had moderate alcohol use disorder, and even more accurate, though less scientific, to say she liked drinking and continued to get sloppy at an age when most adults have grown out of doing so.

But Molly prefers calling Erica an alcoholic, because it’s her strongest card. Alcoholic parents are almost definitionally bad parents. And Molly Jong-Fast needs Erica to be a bad parent.

Because if Erica wasn’t a bad parent, then Molly Jong-Fast is a monster.

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(Molly Jong-Fast)

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Here are some things Molly Jong-Fast does in this book (her own book):

Steals a ring that belongs to her mother and hides it when her mother notices.

Puts her mother and stepfather in a nursing home – over the objection of her mother, her mother’s sister, and her godmother. Then tells her father, “I put Mom in a home, and I don’t feel that bad. I actually feel kind of great.”

Fires a housekeeper who has worked for her mother for decades and and mocks the housekeeper when she complains about the size of her severance check.3

Sells her mother and stepfather’s apartment and doesn’t tell them.

Imagine doing these things.

Now imagine doing them and deciding that you were so justified in doing them that you should tell the world what you’d done.

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“How to Lose Your Mother” is weirdly reminiscent of “Health and Safety,” last year’s memoir about Covid by New Yorker writer Emily Witt. Witt and Jong-Fast seem very different at first. Jong-Fast is a married mother of three and writes constantly about her sobriety. Witt is unmarried and childless and writes constantly about doing drugs.

Yet Witt and Jong-Fast are actually much the same. They’re loud, proud leftists who live in New York City, and they both panicked during Covid.

And they both are deeply cruel to the people closest to them. Just as Jong-Fast spends her memoir trashing Erica, Witt spends her memoir trashing her ex-boyfriend, Andrew. As I wrote about Witt:

Emily Witt would like to think of herself as a tireless fighter for – and speaker for – the voiceless… But when it comes to the most important romantic relationship of her life, Emily Witt is happy to be the only one talking, to speak for Andrew without his consent.

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Feminists like to say the personal is the political, that a society’s structure can define the most intimate choices of its citizens.

That’s obviously true. Yet for Jong-Fast and Witt, the reverse seems equally true: the political is the personal, their ideology gives them license for a self-centeredness so totalizing they cannot even see it.

Leftists inevitably frame their desire for more and more repressive government as a communitarian impulse to look out for everyone else.

During Covid this impulse was particularly explicit.

Favoring lockdowns and mask mandates made people like Jong-Fast feel good. Anyone who opposed them was selfish. Wanting — or needing — to work or go to church or school or an AA meeting or just hang out with friends didn’t mean someone had a different risk tolerance than they did or saw government’s role in society differently. It meant that person was a bad person.

Yet what was more selfish than insisting that government shut society and upend the lives of strangers so that lockdowners could feel safer? The fact that Covid posed almost no risk to people like Jong-Fast was merely the icing on the cake.

Sometimes I wonder if these folks are so desperate the government to step in and help other people because they know they are too selfish ever to do anything meaningful for anyone else.

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I don’t know Molly Jong-Fast. I won’t guess why she hates her mother this much.

Here’s what I do know. “Fear of Flying” is a classic. A generation of women (and plenty of men) grew up reading it. Bookstores still sell it. I bought it yesterday at Barnes & Noble.

Molly Jong-Fast has written two novels that vanished without a trace. I haven’t read them, but I suspect she failed as a novelist for the same reason she’s unsuccessful as a journalist: she is too uninterested in anyone else to explore the world in a way that will resonate with readers. She can exist only as a commentator on television and in particular on X, because X is a medium that rewards one skill above all: projecting one’s own voice at a volume that cuts through the noise.

Molly Jong-Fast must know that her mother has achieved far more than she ever will.

Ironically, Covid does make a brief appearance in “How to Lose Your Mother.” Jong-Fast blames it for her mother’s decline:

Did Covid kill my mom and stepfather? Technically no, functionally yes…

They became too good at quarantining. They just stayed home forever and ever. They drank, and watched TV, and stopped pretending that they could exist in society. They slept until noon and slid into their illnesses. They never came back from quarantine. They never came out of it.

What Jong-Fast doesn’t seem to see — what none of the lockdowners ever saw — is that she is conflating the harms from Covid and the lockdowns she loved so much. Covid wasn’t a choice. The lockdowns were. A choice they were desperate to force on the rest of us.

Molly Jong-Fast could have gone to see her mother and stepfather in 2020. She could have put (useless) masks on them and taken them out for walks. She could even just have gone over to their apartment and turned off their television and talked to them. She could have been kind for an hour or two.

But she didn’t.

She stayed locked in her apartment. She let her mother rot.

She was too scared.

And too selfish.