Picador snaps up Jong-Fast's 'magnificently vivid' memoir about mother Erica Jong

Picador has snapped up Losing Erica Jong, a "magnificently vivid" memoir from Erica Jong’s daughter Molly Jong-Fast. 

Gillian Fitzgerald-Kelly, commissioning editor, acquired UK & Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Meredith Miller at United Talent Agency at auction. North American, Italian and Polish rights have already been acquired. The memoir will be published in spring 2025. 

"A pitch-perfect balance of acceptance and rage, humour and heart, Molly is unsentimental but not unloving as she squares her mother’s dementia with the reality they will never have the relationship she’s longed for," said Miller. 

Losing Erica Jong is a "disarmingly funny" and "unforgettable" memoir about influential feminist writer Erica Jong from the perspective of her daughter. The publisher continued: "Fiercely honest, Molly explores just how much her life has always been intensely entangled with her mother’s as she struggled with the ebbs and flows of life over the years and, as a result, often lost sight of how to be there for her daughter." 

Fitzgerald-Kelly commented: "The only child of a very famous woman, Molly’s book will be about a few different things: a complicated and unique upbringing, a fascination with the literary world and past addictions, but it is first and foremost a story about a mother and daughter, the idiosyncrasies of this inevitably complicated relationship and stepping up to the reality of losing a parent you never really had in the first place."