Absentee Mothers
Two new books by authors Molly Jong-Fast and Nicola Kraus--one memoir, the other fiction--explore how the trauma of maternal absence ripples into the future.
Absentee fathers: two words that get thrown together so often we simply take them for granted as normal or, better put, unremarkable. When relationships with children go south, men leave, women stay. Happens all the time. To me. To many women I know. To the 8.72 million mothers in the U.S.—that’s 80% of all the single-parent households—currently bearing the sole weight of their children’s care and needs. In fact, the percentage of American children living solely with their mothers has doubled since 1968 from 10.7% to a whopping 21%.
But what of absentee mothers? Do we judge those two words and the women they represent more harshly than we do their male counterparts? (Let me answer that for you: um, yes.) And what of their children, once they become adults? How do the psyches of these children, whose mothers either leave or don’t show up for them or both, whether physically or emotionally, get damaged, and what does that damage actually look like as the years progress?
Two new books by Nicola Kraus and Molly Jong-Fast not only explore the ideas and fallout of absentee motherhood, they also force us to confront our own biases toward mothers who go missing, whether physically, in the case of Kraus’s page-turner of a novel, The Best We Could Hope For; or emotionally, as in Jong-Fast’s laugh-out-loud How to Lose Your Mother, a chronicle of watching her famous mother swan dive into dementia while realizing that she never really had her to lose. What happens, both authors ask, when a mother abandons her children? Who takes over that role in her absence? And what does that child do when she, in turn, becomes first an adult then a mother?
Kraus thought a lot about the role mothers play in the life of a family years before she became one. She was the wunderkind co-author of the bestselling The Nanny Diaries, which then became a film starring Scarlett Johansson and Laura Linney. The Best We Could Hope For is the first novel Kraus has written solo: a story that had been percolating in her subconscious, she told me, for years, even as she was working with her partner, Emma McLaughlin, on nine other novels. In fact, it was McLaughlin who urged her to finally sit down and write it. Jong-Fast—also a mother, and also a former wunderkind first novelist—is an on-air political pundit, a successful podcaster, and she also just happens to be the daughter of bestselling author Erica Jong, who became a household name following the massive success of her first novel—which I read and loved, possibly too early in my childhood—Fear of Flying. In other words, Jong-Fast is the daughter of the woman who invented the zipless fuck. (“Pour one out for me,” she says of this distinction.)
I read Kraus’s novel in galleys on the beach at the end of last summer, where I was swept away not only by the story itself, but also by one of those giant, post-hurricane waves which somehow became a sort of mini tsunami, rushing up to dry land too fast to react, knocking me over, and dragging me, my beach chair, and Kraus’s book into the ocean with it. Never mind my soaking wet iPhone and ruined AirPods. I think it’s relevant to admit here that I cared more about rescuing that book from the roiling sea than my electronic equipment. I was in the middle of it! Totally sucked into the story! And I could not fathom waiting a day to know what happened next.
Meanwhile, I planned on reading Jong-Fast’s memoir on the plane to France, where I went to scatter my friend’s ashes, but it was so so funny, gripping, moving, juicy, and thought-provoking, I ended up reading the entire book in the airport while waiting to board. Jong-Fast and I first met back in the late 90s, when our debut books were acquired and edited by the same editor, Molly Doyle—the memoir Shutterbabe for me, the roman à clef Normal Girl for her—so as I was reading her memoir, armed with her cell phone number, I kept peppering Jong-Fast with texts, bowled over by the book’s humor and insights.
In fact, both Kraus and Jong-Fast’s books not only left deep impressions, they had me reexamining my own motherhood in light of them. Remembering, specifically, the time when I was working full-time as a producer at Dateline NBC while raising young toddlers. My then three-year-old saw my suitcase appear on the bed yet again and started to wail. “Don’t go!” he screamed. Not unusual, this response, but this time he was apoplectic. And he admitted that, when I was gone, he spent most of his free time in my closet, smelling my clothes. It was a turning point for both me and my role as a parent, when I realized I needed to figure out a way to keep making money—I was my family’s primary wage earner—while remaining more present. Or at least to have my absences be more predictable than those driven by the vagaries of the news cycle. Hence my then new career, in 1998, as a writer. I guess you’d have to ask my kids what they thought of their mother becoming a writer, especially since I sometimes still write about them, just as Erica Jong wrote about her daughter, although my children, unlike Molly, have full veto power over these appearances and foreknowledge of their publication. But I would like to think that, while I was often “absent”—either writing in my office outside our home, when my kids were small, or traveling on book tours, or off in LA working on the occasional TV show—I was as emotionally present as a mother can be. And definitely more present than, say, the totally absent mother in Kraus’s book, with all of that situation’s far-reaching implications for the absent mother’s older sister and her children.
In lieu of spoiling that book and laying out what those implications were, or even summarizing the plots of each book here, I will simply urge you to go in blind, be surprised, and read both of them. In fact, as you’re planning which books to read this summer, I can think of no two better complementary—if completely different—stories to throw in your beach bag. Just, you know, don’t sit on the sand so soon after a hurricane. And leave your preconceptions about what makes a good mother—and a bad one—at the door.
For paid subscribers, I have recorded my conversations with both Kraus and Jong-Fast, which you can watch, in full, below.
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