LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE HERE:
My final guest of this season is the journalist
. The author of four books, Molly started writing about politics in 2016. She’s now a special correspondent for Vanity Fair, a political analyst for MSNBC News and host of the Fast Politics Podcast.But she is also the daughter of the novelist Erica Jong, who in the 1970s wrote a novel that became synonymous with the sexual revolution. Fear of Flying, featuring Jong’s alter ego Isadora Wing, sold 20 million copies and coined the phrase the zipless fuck.
Molly was born into a world of fame and celebrity. As she puts it she grew up with her mother everywhere - on television, the answer to a question in games shows, in the newspaper. But rarely at home.
Now Molly has written How To Lose Your Mother, a daughter’s memoir about middle age and losing your mother to dementia when actually you never had her. It’s funny candid, gossipy, entertaining a story of love, frustration and, occasionally, despair.
Molly joined me to talk about how she survived when everyone started dying around her, ageing without a guidebook, how algorithms shape misogyny, why you can never escape being a nepo baby, being a bad daughter, why it’s ok to lie to your kids ad only learning she could be right about things in her 40s.
PLUS the best example of the confidence of mediocre white man in action I’ve heard in a long time.
Listen to the full episode here:
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