My Mother’s Daughter

I follow Molly Jong-Fast on Twitter for her wry observations about the horror show that is American politics in 2019. She has written a  piece about her complicated family for  NYRB

“Of course, we had an open marriage.” The cameras were rolling. I could smell my mother’s thick, expensive perfume. It was one of those very gray, cold New York City winter days, dark at 4:30. 
My most recent slate of maternal problems had started with the death of Nora Ephron at seventy-one. She had been my mother’s heartbreak riddle: the novelist who had gone on to make it in Hollywood while still writing for The New Yorker. I completely understood the feeling; I would have been incredibly jealous, too, had I been Nora’s peer. It was made worse by the fact that, though incredibly attractive, Nora also wrote pieces about the deficits in her physical appearance like “I feel bad about my neck.” 

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