About this Event
Moderating this discussion is the 3rd generation owner of Strand Book Store Nancy Bass Wyden, and bestselling author Alexandra Styron. This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.
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ACCESSIBILITY:
Strand Book Store is an ADA compliant venue. The event space is accessible via elevator.
ASL interpretation is available for this event by request only. Please reach out to our events team at [email protected] by May 1 to request.
Please ask a Strand employee upon arrival for directions to accessible seating if preferred.
For further information on accessibility in this space, or to make a request, please contact [email protected]
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
“With propulsive humor and perspective on her annus horribilis, Jong-Fast achieves the memoir’s transformative work of alchemy, arming us all with lines so good you won’t just want to underline them, you will want to cut them out to share.” —The Washington Post
“This raw, intimate memoir is a stunning portrait of difficult relationships and how we survive them.” —People
“Molly Jong-Fast’s memoir is mesmerizing, intimate, wise, unputdownable, crazily honest, heartbreaking, funny, illuminating—beautiful and painful at the same time, just like real life.” —Anne Lamott
From the political writer and podcaster, a ferociously honest and disarmingly funny memoir about her elusive mother’s encroaching dementia and a reckoning with her complicated childhood
Molly Jong-Fast is the only child of a famous woman, writer Erica Jong, whose sensational book Fear of Flying launched her into second-wave feminist stardom. She grew up yearning for a connection with her dreamy, glamorous, just out of reach mother, who always seemed to be heading somewhere that wasn’t with Molly. When, in 2023, Erica was diagnosed with dementia just as Molly’s husband discovered he had a rare cancer, Jong-Fast was catapulted into a transformative year.
How to Lose Your Mother is a compulsively readable memoir about an intense mother–daughter relationship, a sometimes chaotic upbringing with a fame-hungry parent, and the upheavals that challenge our hard-won adulthood. A pitch-perfect balance of acceptance and rage, humor and heart, How to Lose Your Mother tells a universal story of loss alongside a singular story of a literary life. This is a memoir that will stand alongside the classics of the genre.
Photo credit: Sara Messinger
Molly Jong-Fast is a contributing op-ed writer at The New York Times, an MSNBC political analyst, host of the Fast Politics podcast and author of The New York Times best seller How to Lose Your Mother.
Nancy Bass Wyden is the 3rd generation owner of Strand Book Store.
Alexandra Styron is an author based in Brooklyn, New York. Her most recent book, Steal This Country: A Handbook for Resistance, Persistence, and Fixing Almost Everything is a how-to for, and celebration of, youth and social justice. Alexandra is also the author of the bestselling memoir Reading My Father, finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize, and All The Finest Girls, a novel. Her work has appeared in several anthologies as well as The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, and The Financial Times, among other publications.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Strand Book Store, 828 Broadway, New York, United States
USD 13.61 to USD 25.22











