The mother central to Molly Jong-Fast’s memoir, How to Lose Your Mother, just published by Picador, is Erica Jong, author of the 1973 novel Fear of Flying which became a seminal work about the emotional, psychological and sexual complexities facing women at the time. With the huge exception of current sexual mores, Jong-Fast covers similar subjects half a century on.

Jong-Fast is writing in mid-life. She is at that difficult age when parents – hers, her husband’s – are getting ill and dying. An age which can be both full of grief and relief. An age where the child can become parent to their parents and realises that with decline and absence of a ‘higher authority’ in their life the slightly scary need to become fully adult.

Ambivalence is the running theme of this memoir. Molly Jong-Fast seems to be still processing the relationship she has and has had with her parents and step-parents and whether she was ever loved by them, or loved them herself.

In one rather grandiose breath she tells us: “My mom, whom I adore more than a daughter has ever loved a mother…” In another she’ll detail some vile behaviour of her mother that the reader, let alone, a daughter, would find hard to forgive.

She takes us with her on this processing journey where she seems to be running, or at least sidling, away from the long shadow her mother has cast all her life.

The memoir’s title refers to this desire to escape, to shake off her mother’s legacy and also the sense of disappearance as her famous mother’s once sharp and witty mind clouds with dementia.

Jong-Fast puts her mother and her stepfather (who also has dementia) into a nursing home. She sells their apartment, sells their lifetime collection of first editions and when her stepfather dies she muses: “A big day for Erica Jong used to be being on television, or giving a speech, or accepting an award, but now my mother no longer does things like that, so her big day is burying her husband.” We feel the very real sadness of the loss, but there is more than a hint of relished revenge.

Jong-Fast, sober since the age of 19, is the only child of a narcissistic, sexually incontinent, alcoholic mother who enjoyed the kind of wealth and fame which readily lends itself to a skewed sense of reality. Jong-Fast bluntly tells us appalling stories of emotional neglect as a child and adult, but then addresses the reader directly saying “I don’t want you to hate any of these people”. The narrative is as winding, and sometimes chaotic as her own life must have felt.

The universal themes Jong-Fast covers will be familiar to so many therapists and counsellors from inter-generational addiction (her maternal grandmother was also an alcoholic), mid-life crisis (her husband is diagnosed with cancer as the story progresses), the overwhelming admin of dealing with ageing parents, the distress of dementia and she covers all with aplomb. Even Jong-Fast’s core struggle to individuate from a mother who is both famous and overbearing whilst unique in some regards, is often relatable.

However, despite its many strengths How to Lose Your Mother remained for me an uneasy read. As I finished the book I looked at the author photograph. Jong-Fast’s shoulders are hunched and she’s looking off somewhere, not directly at the reader. In retrospect I believe this tells us quite a lot about how the book is written.