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get your podcasts. This is fresh air. I'm Teria Gross. My guest, Molly Zhang Fast, new memoir,

begins with this sentence. I am the only child of a once famous woman. Her mother is writer

Erica Zhang, who became famous for her 1973 novel Fear of Flying,

which sold about 20 million copies and was considered a groundbreaking work of second wave

feminist literature. The story's main character is a married woman who feels the passion has

drained from the relationship. Her fantasy is having passionate

sex with a stranger, with no commitment, no relationship, maybe not even knowing each other's

names. Erica John called that kind of relationship, a zipless, sex word that we can't say on

the radio. That expression caught on. Erica Zhang wrote a couple of other

popular novels and then wrote novels that didn't catch on. Molly writes that her mother had become

addicted to fame and couldn't bear losing it. From Molly's perspective, the addiction to fame

and alcohol meant she got very little attention from her mother.

The book goes back and forth in time, but its focus is on the worst year of Molly's life,

2023, the year when she put her mother and stepfather in a nursing home because of their dementia.

Her stepfather died later that year.

The family dog had to be euthanized, and her husband was diagnosed with metastasized pancreatic cancer.

When the memoir ends, the treatment for the cancer has been effective, and he's cancer-free.

The memoir is titled, How to Lose Your Mother.

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