Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything

Molly Jong-Fast is best known as a writer and political commentator. But before she became the host of Fast Politics with Molly Jong-Fast, a regular on MSNBC, and a novelist and memoirist, she was the daughter of Erica Jong. Jong catapulted to literary stardom with her 1973 novel Fear of Flying. The bold — and, at the time — shocking story of a married woman looking for casual sex made her a literary icon of second-wave feminism. And although Jong-Fast was an only child, she grew up sharing her life with the fictional alter-egos Jong created and longing for a deeper connection with her alcoholic and mostly-absent mother. But now, Jong-Fast has turned the tables. She’s written an unsparing memoir about her relationship with her mother and Jong’s struggle with dementia titled, How to Lose Your Mother. Kara talks to Molly about difficult mothers, the perils of writing a memoir, her pivot to journalism, and what gives her hope for America. Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram, TikTok, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I did the thing that I had been taught to do when writing, which was to get on the page and open a vein.

• 0:07Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  And that was how my mom did it. And that was how that was sort of. And and everything else, I feel like I can't, you know, either people like it or don't. Do you know what I mean?

• 0:17Kara Swisher?

  I think you think more than I do. That's why I'm vaguely happier, although we have the same mother, I think.

• 0:35Kara Swisher?

  Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. My guest today is writer, podcaster, and political analyst Molly Jong Fast. Molly is also the daughter of writer and second-wave feminist Erica Jong, known for her groundbreaking 1973 autobiographical novel Fear of Flying. It made Erica Jong incredibly famous back in the day, similar to Molly's grandfather, Howard Fast, who wrote Spartacus and dozens of other books. Molly is a literary nepo baby of sorts. I met Molly, though, not having anything to do with that, in Washington, DC, when she started writing columns about Trump for a variety of publications. And she was very lively and had not been in the political scene for very long

• 1:18Kara Swisher?

  and started to really make a splash in terms of being much more out there and really going for it and being more fashioning her career like a social media journalist in a lot of ways. And I thought it was really interesting. Her latest book, though, is not about politics. It's about her mother. It's called How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir about her difficult relationship with her mother and how it changed when she started slipping into dementia a few years ago in 2023. I wanted to talk to Molly about all of that and also how she shifted gears from being a book writer to becoming a liberal social media news influencer and political analyst. Our expert question this week comes from the great memoirist Anne Lamott, one of my favorite people. Molly is very funny and heartfelt, and the issue of how you deal with your parents

• 2:03Kara Swisher?

  is something near and dear to my heart. So stay with us.

• 2:16Speaker 02

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• 3:24Speaker 04

  Have you ever looked up and realized your leisure time isn't actually all that leisurely?

• 3:30Speaker 05

  So what starts out as wanting to learn something and wanting to progress through different ways of knowing how to do something turns into something that you're sort of like giving yourself a score on.

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• 3:55Speaker 02

  Thanks for coming on, On. And we're going to start with essentially How to Lose Your Mother, the book you've written. I think it's fair to say that 2025 has been a challenging year so far, especially for a person so immersed in politics like yourself.

• 4:07Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:08Speaker 02

  But it sounds like 2023, the year you wrote How to Lose Your Mother, it might be a cakewalk in comparison. I thought the book was wonderful. I was surprised by it because I read your other writing, which is more, I would say, more glib and more.

• 4:21Kara Swisher?

  You know, you're a political writer in a lot of ways. By the way, you're a beautiful writer, no matter what, but in this case, even more beautiful. But for those who haven't read the book, can you give a quick overview of what 2023 was like for you?

• 4:34Speaker 00

  So basically, one of my friends, who is also Jewish, read it. And she said to me, and I feel like, she said, it's a Jewish beach read. Like, it's very, you read it very fast. You, you know, it's fun to read, but it is very dark.

• 4:53Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, so in 2023, I thought that it was going to be a normal year. And actually, one of my kids had wisdom teeth out. And we had like, made this whole thing to be there, because I had had my wisdom teeth out when I was young. And it had been just like a, for whatever reason, I had, everything had gone wrong. So we planned everything, and then January came. And my husband got, he was having some stomach pain. He went to the hospital, they found a mass on his pancreas in the emergency room.

• 5:25Kara Swisher?

  Which is a very troubling.

• 5:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:27Kara Swisher?

  Mass to have where it was.

• 5:29Speaker 00

  And then, like, in short order, my mother and stepfather, who had been living alone, but in a very sort of untenable situation, but I had been like, trying to let them live there. It just, the wheels fell off. He ended up in, back and forth in the hospital, because he had dementia and Parkinson's. And then she ended up, I mean, it just, everything sort of went pear shaped. And that was like, sort of the highlight of the year, because then, after that happened, we moved them into a home, my stepfather died, my husband had all these surgeries on the pancreas, which it turned out to be okay, but there was a lot of like, is this the bad cancer? Is this the good cancer?

• 6:10Kara Swisher?

  Pancreatic cancer is usually very, is usually a death sentence.

• 6:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, turned out to be the good cancer, yeah. Um, and then he went back to have more surgery. And while he was having surgery, his father fell, broke his pelvis. And then, because he was 91, had a cascade of other stuff, and then died. And then my aunt died. And then, and it just was, it just was like this craziness. There was this one moment where we were at the same funeral home in Connecticut, because we had been there for his father's funeral, and then we'd been there for the aunt's funeral. And the people who own the funeral home came out to us. Because it was like, three weeks later, and we're like, are you okay?

• 6:52Kara Swisher?

  Oh.

• 6:52Speaker 00

  And I

• 6:54Kara Swisher?

  Pity from funeral home people.

• 6:56Speaker 00

  And I thought, how bad does it have to be for these guys to come out?

• 6:59Kara Swisher?

  Because it's good business, right, you know? Oh, my God.

• 7:03Speaker 00

  And also, like, those guys have seen some shit.

• 7:05Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, I would say that. That is a lot. What do you, what do you think the universe was telling you at that moment?

• 7:11Speaker 00

  I think, I actually think that the universe was telling me that you, and this is the message of that book. And it's funny, because this is the message of the book. There's a lot about my mom, and I think people are very interested in that relationship.

• 7:23Kara Swisher?

  Well, it's built around your relationship with your mom, which informs everything you do.

• 7:27Speaker 00

  Right, exactly. But I actually think the message of that book is you can get through anything. Because throughout it, like, Matt and I would look at each other, and we'd be like, the only way through is through.

• 7:38Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I was waiting for an asteroid at some level. But you talk about, it is built around your mom and your relationship with your mother, because it obviously informs a lot of your life. And either breaking away from it, or embracing it, often breaking away from it. You had a lot of lines that I really, like, obviously, the one that got attention is how could you lose your mother? But by the way, is still alive.

• 7:59Speaker 00

  Right.

• 8:00Kara Swisher?

  And one thing you note, which I think the line everyone's picking up on, is how could you lose her if you never had her? Right?

• 8:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:05Kara Swisher?

  She was a non-present parent, and she was the most important relationship of your life at the time.

• 8:11Speaker 00

  Oh, my God, yeah.

• 8:11Kara Swisher?

  Some of the lines that I thought were interesting was, you know, as she descended into dementia, you said she was an echo of herself, which is, you know, that you never, you didn't have a very clear relationship with her. And then she became an echo of her very loud personality most of her life, which is a beautiful line. So one of the things I thought were so relatable in the book were your deliberations about whether to refer to her in the past to the present. You write, "She's both alive and dead. She's both my mom and not my mom." Talk a little bit about that.

• 8:41Speaker 00

  So this is actually a really common phenomenon that almost everyone describes when they have a loved one or a parent with dementia, which is, they are both there and not there, right? It's like, you have a moment where you see

• 8:58Speaker 00

  That whatever makes a person themselves, and I think that is a real open question, starts to go. You know, it becomes a question of like, who are you? What are the things that constitute a person? I mean, I remember when I was young, my father was a Buddhist, and actually, my grandfather, Howard Fass, was also weirdly a Buddhist. And, I mean, I remember my father saying, you know, he's a vegetarian, so do with this information what you will. But I remember him saying, like, the person is just hamburger. Like, the body is not the person.

• 9:29Kara Swisher?

  Meat.

• 9:30Speaker 00

  Meat, right. And so the, so when she was slipping away, there was this feeling that it wasn't really, like, I just had a moment where I was like, it's over. Like, I cannot ever make the peace. Like, all I wanted was to have the kind of relationship with my mother that I have with my daughter.

• 9:47Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 9:48Speaker 00

  You know, where we, you can be mad at me, but the love, and I loved my mother, and she loved me. Like, I do believe she loved me as much as she could love anyone who was not her, or not a man. You know, men had a different kind of relationship to women in my mother's generation, I think.

• 10:09Kara Swisher?

  Right. It's interesting, because you said, you also said, I didn't ever have her. I don't.

• 10:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:14Kara Swisher?

  How can you, again, lose someone that you didn't have that? I mean, wishing for a relationship is one thing, making it real is another, right?

• 10:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:21Kara Swisher?

  Having it real. And one of the things that really struck me is I have a very similar relationship with my mom. You know, my mom does the same very dramatic, I love you so much, this and this and that.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  Right.

• 10:29Kara Swisher?

  And it took me many, many, many years to say, I know you think you love me.

• 10:35Speaker 00

  Right.

• 10:36Kara Swisher?

  Which is, you know, I think that was as much as I could acknowledge, but it was very much, you really don't. Like, you would.

• 10:42Speaker 00

  It's, yeah.

• 10:44Kara Swisher?

  Well, you don't in the traditional sense.

• 10:46Speaker 00

  It's so gaslighting.

• 10:46Kara Swisher?

  Yes, yeah. No, but I think they think it, which is interesting. In your case, you lost the ability to have that discussion with your mother intelligently, although I don't think you ever would have had that discussion with your mother, even with her full faculties, or relatively full faculties at the age, you know, she was reached.

• 11:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, don't you have that experience with with your mom? I mean, sorry to ask.

• 11:07Kara Swisher?

  She's fully there. My mother's fully there.

• 11:09Speaker 00

  But she's but but don't you have that experience where like with my mom? I would say like when she was still with it, we'd have conversation. I'd be like, you know, I I know you say you love me so much, but.

• 11:21Kara Swisher?

  Evidence to the contrary.

• 11:22Speaker 00

  Right. There I feel like this kind of thing, when you get really drunk and embarrass me in front of everyone I know, I feel like that doesn't feel like you loving me. And you know, like very therapized and she could not. And she'd be like, you hate me. I I right? If you hate everything of, you know.

• 11:40Kara Swisher?

  You never liked me. Yeah, I know. I've had that conversation.

• 11:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:44Kara Swisher?

  Yeah. And and at one point, I was like, really? You're right. I don't. So you you have the benefit, and I I hate to say it this way, was your mother has dementia and she used to drink. So I have neither of those things. I was like, can I have an excuse for this? But no, indeed, it is completely a chosen situation, which is hard. Let's talk a little bit about your mother first. We'll get back to having the same mother. We could we could trade them if you'd like a version. If you're wishing to give it a try, you can use mine.

• 12:13Speaker 00

  Lucky seems actually a little scarier than my mom. Because she's very active.

• 12:19Kara Swisher?

  She's very sharp. She is.

• 12:20Speaker 00

  And she didn't she break out of the nursing home?

• 12:23Kara Swisher?

  She did. She's I've got her in another one now. Yeah.

• 12:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:26Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 12:26Speaker 00

  See, Erica Jong does not break out of nursing homes.

• 12:29Kara Swisher?

  Well, that's a good thing. I wish that was the case.

• 12:31Speaker 00

  I know. I know. I think you have it a little worse with the breaking out of nursing home.

• 12:36Kara Swisher?

  So your mom, let's talk about who your mom is for people that don't know. Your mom, because it is part of the story, because it it it forms her narcissism. And her and her quest for fame that really, really fucked with her in a lot of ways. Which I think which was was interesting. So you write very smartly about famous and becoming unfamous, actually. So your mom became very famous as a so called second wave feminist after her 1973 autobiographical novel Fear of Flying. It's sexually explicit, sex positive, as most people say today, and also very funny. It was published before you were born. Talk a little bit about the fame and how it impacted you, especially the fear of flying, which I don't think as many younger people know these days or wouldn't find very shocking. But at the time, it most certainly was.

• 13:21Kara Swisher?

  Shocking. I remember it as a as a 10 year old. I was like, whoa. You know, and everyone was looking for the book to read. All the all the 10 to 12 year olds were looking for the book to read.

• 13:31Speaker 00

  So, yes, it was very shocking. It published in 1973. I think the way to think of it is contextually, the pill, right? Game changer. But it takes a little while to sort of get into the culture. 1973, Fear of Flying, and also Roe v. Wade, the same year. And from what I understand from people coming over and telling me about it, which I think is sort of the most useful kind of thing, is that people, there were many women who read that book and were like, I've been doing it wrong. Like, I can have sex, I can, I don't have to be married to the first person I sleep with. You know, it was just sort of

• 14:15Speaker 00

  a, it was a like, you don't have to be what your parents told you you needed to be. And remember, my mom was born in 1942. So, I think what was hard for her was, she really did want to be an academic. My grandfather was very, he had three daughters and his whole thing was, everyone needed to be an academic, they all needed to get graduate degrees. My mother went to Barnard, she was a good student. She was actually with Martha Stewart at Barnard.

• 14:39Kara Swisher?

  Oh, wow. That would have been something.

• 14:41Speaker 00

  And she did sleep with Andy Stewart.

• 14:43Kara Swisher?

  Oh, okay. All right, good.

• 14:45Speaker 00

  And I said, did you ruin Martha Stewart's marriage? At first, she said, this is very Eric C. John, she said, what happens in Frankfurt stays in Frankfurt.

• 14:53Kara Swisher?

  Okay.

• 14:54Speaker 00

  At the book fair. I was like, okay. And then she said, many people slept with Andy Stewart.

• 15:00Kara Swisher?

  Oh, so not my fault.

• 15:02Speaker 00

  Not my fault. I actually think that Martha was really mad at my mom because, years later, my father got married, remarried, a few years later, not that many years later, and Martha was really wanted to do the wedding, which I feel like was a sign that she was not pleased.

• 15:21Kara Swisher?

  Well, that's a nice side story.

• 15:23Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 15:23Kara Swisher?

  But, but anyway, she was very famous, your mother.

• 15:26Speaker 00

  Yes. Oh, sorry. She was very famous, yes.

• 15:28Kara Swisher?

  There were several Betty Friedan, there was a bunch of, like, women writers that came up, and hers was the, sort of, the sexy one.

• 15:35Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 15:36Kara Swisher?

  I remember many of the appearances she had on a lot of the TV shows. She was often on television shows, and it was, they were more titillated by her. You could feel

• 15:43Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 15:44Kara Swisher?

  that, right? How did that impact you? You know, here you are, you were, she was famous when you were born, which you wouldn't have realized for quite a few years, but she was, say, 10 years into it.

• 15:54Speaker 00

  You know, she was glamorous and interesting and smart. You know,

• 16:00Speaker 00

  It's important to remember that the world in which I grew up in doesn't exist anymore. So there was Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe and there were these fancy male journalists who dominated everything. They wrote for Vanity Fair and GQ and The New Yorker and they had these outsized influences in the culture. And they don't really exist anymore. Like, that's not how we do it anymore.

• 16:27Kara Swisher?

  No, we have Theo Von now.

• 16:28Speaker 00

  Right, exactly. And it, yeah. That's not so good. But, so, they had these outsized influences in the culture and she could never get in that group. And that was very hard for her.

• 16:39Kara Swisher?

  For her. How did it impact you?

• 16:40Speaker 00

  Oh, how did it impact me?

• 16:41Kara Swisher?

  It's easier to talk about her, isn't it?

• 16:44Speaker 00

  Right. Uh, yes. So, for me, I, I think I was uniquely poorly designed for that childhood because I was dyslexic. So that was a real problem. And I was also, you know, I got sober at nineteen because I really was an alcoholic. Like, I really was. You know, I do believe that there are some people who are born alcoholics and I really had that DNA where I just...

• 17:11Kara Swisher?

  Well, she was and your grandmother was.

• 17:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, grandmother was too, yeah. But I had, in my DNA, just such the ism, if that makes sense. So I was extremely ill-prepared for that childhood. But I got through it.

• 17:27Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 17:27Speaker 00

  And my mom, you know, she had people who sort of took care of her.

• 17:32Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, she left you alone, a lot, which is what you write about. When you say ill-prepared, I think she was ill-prepared for you. That's...

• 17:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, I also think she was not, there was just a lot of, I mean, you have to remember, it is also the seventies and eighties. And like, people didn't parent the way they do now. Right? I mean, we didn't have car seats. Everybody smoked. My, you know what I mean? Like, I mean, when I was three years old, I drank the bottoms of everyone, glasses of champagne at a mitzvah. And everyone thought it was adorable. Like, it was just a very different way to grow up. And there were other kids I met who were the children of famous people who also were sort of dr-... Dragged along and sort of treated like.

• 18:14Kara Swisher?

  An afterthought.

• 18:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:15Kara Swisher?

  It feels a little British. It feels a little rich people, fancy people.

• 18:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a trope.

• 18:20Kara Swisher?

  It's a trope. It's interesting because right now you're saying, oh, it wasn't so weird. It actually was so weird.

• 18:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's not a good way to grow up.

• 18:28Kara Swisher?

  When I talk about my mom, everyone's like, I used to say, oh, you know, a lot of people are like that. They weren't. They weren't, right? And I have a really hard time with my wife, whose parents are so lovely, like, wouldn't be better parents. And very similar to how I parent my kids, like, you know, you can see it. The only real fight we have is, I was like, you don't understand what it was like to be raised by wolves. Because you weren't. Like, you don't understand, like, you know, it was like, sort of, the the, the, the constant lack of attention. And I think one of the things you struggle with was feeling like you're being a bad daughter to a woman who doesn't seem like she was a very good mother.

• 19:05Speaker 00

  Right.

• 19:05Kara Swisher?

  I want to play one of the passages that really hit home. This is right after you moved your mom and stepdad in what you call the world's most expensive nursing home, which is where I've been moving my mother, too. But let's, let's get, let's read, let's listen to this.

• 19:17Speaker 00

  A couple of days later, I called my dad, my one remaining parent. I was in a taxi heading to CNN to do a late night panel. I told him that mom wasn't dead yet, but that she wasn't exactly in there anymore. I told him that all she did was sleep and drink. I told him how guilty I felt. I said that I shouldn't be at the CNN studios. Wherever I was, I felt I should have been somewhere else. I should have been spending more time with my kids, with my parents, with my dogs, with my cancerous husband.

• 19:53Speaker 00

  My dad tried to reassure me in his own peculiar fucked up way. You know, he said, when you were a little girl, the nanny and I used to try to get your mom to spend time with you. We tried to get her to spend just an hour a day with you. This admission made me feel so great. She couldn't do it, my dad said. She couldn't even spend one hour with you. The most she could do was half an hour.

• 20:24Kara Swisher?

  Hmm, you didn't know that?

• 20:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, my dad was, I mean, you know, there's a fair amount of everyone settling the score behind the scenes, but yes.

• 20:35Kara Swisher?

  You're right that you spent a lot of time wondering if you weren't taking care of them because they didn't take care of you. I think a lot of people in the sandwich generation can relate to that. But do you still feel guilt about not taking care of her? Because it sounds like she hardly took care of you. And I do want to ask about your father. Why isn't he as culpable in that?

• 20:53Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. No, it's a good question. So, do I still feel guilty? The answer is not really. But with my father, I think what happened was, so, I mean, if you want to get into the sort of nitty gritty of the divorce, they had this really just epic divorce. She, in the end, he kind of gave up and went away. Not the best answer, but people didn't have joint custody back then.

• 21:26Kara Swisher?

  Right, men certainly didn't.

• 21:28Speaker 00

  So, but he's like subsequently like apologized to me and said I should have fought harder, I should have. I don't, I think it was very hard for him and for her to, you know, my grandfather had introduced them, and I think they thought in 1975, when they met, or 74, that they were going to get together and they were both going to become these famous writers, and they were going to live in Malibu and have this life that was this sort of fantasy. And what happened instead was they got together and they were going to kill each other, and she was an alcoholic, and he had, you know, a lot of issues with his dad, and everything just imploded.

• 22:11Speaker 00

  And then they couldn't, it just was all of this sort of worst of everything. Oh, but my husband has this great shrink, and he is very brilliant and writes books called George MacCary. And George Macari said to Matt Greenfield about me, he said, "Sometimes the children of narcissists become stuck on trying to fix their relationships with their narcissistic parents, despite the fact that there's not any role for them to play and that they over sort of become overly guilty because of that." And that made so much sense that it made me think that that's what I did.

• 22:50Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 23:00Kara Swisher?

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• 25:56Kara Swisher?

  Every episode, we have a question from an outside expert. Let's listen to yours.

• 25:59Speaker 06

  Hi, Molly Mushu. This is your friend Annie Lamott.

• 26:04Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 26:04Speaker 06

  And my question is, having also lost my mother to Alzheimer's, what is your relationship to yours now, both physically and in your heart and mind? Love you, honey.

• 26:20Kara Swisher?

  Talk about your relationship now, because even though, despite the alcoholism and the narcissism, you did have a good relationship there for a while. You did interviews together recently, in 2019.

• 26:31Speaker 00

  By the way, I love that you got... That was so cool. That's really cool, getting Annie in there.

• 26:36Kara Swisher?

  We're good on that.

• 26:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, thank you. I... So my mother, you know, I visit her at the nursing home. We put her in a new nursing home that I think is much nicer. And we have this wonderful man who sits with her during the day called Johnny. And we went out for Mother's Day brunch. We have, you know, we... And I get the kids over there so she gets to see the kids. It's okay. It's not, it's very sort of, it's not as much as it probably should be. But I see her and it makes me really sad.

• 27:12Kara Swisher?

  She recognizes you, correct?

• 27:13Speaker 00

  She recognizes me, but she doesn't recognize my kids anymore. Or she doesn't, she sort of knows they exist, but she can't remember who they are or what they are. I mean, what was genuinely weird about the Times thing was, you know.

• 27:30Kara Swisher?

  There's an article in the New York Times.

• 27:31Speaker 00

  There's, right. And in it, the author calls my mom and asks her how she thinks about the book.

• 27:37Kara Swisher?

  She gave a very cogent answer, actually.

• 27:39Speaker 00

  Yes. So it was very strange. I mean, I knew she would give a cogent answer because I knew she has always felt that way. You know, she's always said, you have a right to write anything you want. But it's sort of a misrepresentation because she's not, like, I don't think she's capable of making decisions per se. So it's like a very ethically cloudy moment.

• 28:03Kara Swisher?

  Right, it is. It was interesting because I thought, I actually thought the writer was a little aggressive at you, which was interesting because the answer was quite cogent. It was, you should be able to write what you want, but this is not someone who seems to have read the book, correct?

• 28:16Speaker 00

  No.

• 28:16Kara Swisher?

  Or is able to finish it.

• 28:18Speaker 00

  She can't read.

• 28:19Kara Swisher?

  She can't read. She's lost the ability to read.

• 28:21Speaker 00

  And I didn't want to, what I didn't want is for her to be upset.

• 28:25Kara Swisher?

  Do you feel like writing the book, delving into your childhood, gave you closure? Because she can't read it.

• 28:30Speaker 00

  Right.

• 28:31Kara Swisher?

  I always joke with my mom and she's like, oh, you're gonna write a terrible book about me when I die. I go, absolutely fucking lutely. You're never gonna read it. Or maybe you'll read it from heaven, I don't know. I'm not sure that's the way you're headed. We joke about this. But, but it is ethically challenging. And someone's like, should you do that when she can read it or when she can't? And I was like, can't, obviously.

• 28:53Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, look, my mom wrote a book that had a lot of stuff that made a lot of people really unhappy, including like Alan John, right? He's dead now. But that guy was just a, he was like a private person. So if you were just apples to apples, me writing about our experience together is absolutely not comparable. But I also think that she.

• 29:19Speaker 00

  Really what Erica John cared about was her literary legacy, more than anything. So she made me, you know, for years and years and years, she said, I made you my literary executor. I want to have a Didion-like, I mean, she wasn't Didion then, but she knew that what she wanted was the thing that Norman Mailer doesn't have, but Joan Didion does have, right? That legacy of mattering. That's all she wanted. So in this way, that book does help with the legacy of Erica John.

• 29:50Kara Swisher?

  Interesting. Oh, good excuse.

• 29:52Speaker 00

  It's a good excuse, but it's also true. It happens also to be true.

• 29:55Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, maybe it'll get to you. But the Times, of course, called it literary retribution and quotes you as saying that you sold out Erica John. Explain that.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  Right. Well, I think it's terrible.

• 30:05Kara Swisher?

  I don't mind that you did it. I think she totally deserved it, but...

• 30:07Speaker 00

  The me in this equation, the normal human who is not particularly, I don't like it. Like, I don't feel great about it. But I also feel...

• 30:18Kara Swisher?

  Talk about that. Why?

• 30:21Speaker 00

  Because it's just not how I, you know, I don't, I'm like a normal person. So I certainly have desires of grandeur, like I would like the book to sell a lot of copies. And I think I do help people in the book. Like, I do think, you read it and you think, like, oh, you can really sort of do this and do that and it be okay. And like, I think the most useful stuff in the book is the stuff where Mac gets sick and I talk about how you deal with the kids when the husband is sick, like, because that, I think, is actually really useful, because a lot of people get cancer. And I think one of the things I was able to do was sort of help them stay in their lives and not get too involved with ours, so that they didn't get too involved with their dad being sick, which I thought was really a good thing I did.

• 31:06Speaker 00

  But, you know, it's the salaciousness of it and the alcoholism and the, you know, who cares what happened in my childhood? Like, it's over. That stuff. But I did have that realization, which I think is worth talking about, which is that if you are an unhappy child, your unhappy childhood, you're just constantly trying to get in there and fix it. Whereas these people were happy children.

• 31:29Kara Swisher?

  These happy children people.

• 31:30Speaker 00

  Right, but they are just, they spend all their time talking about like, how can it be over? Right? Like, I just wanted to be, you know, like, whereas I really do feel delighted to not be 11.

• 31:42Kara Swisher?

  Right, that's fair. I do too. I mean, in a lot of ways, it could be a self-help book, although I think it's a self-help book for you, honestly. I mean, a lot of this, this genre is, you know, Jeanette McCurdy, I'm glad my mother's dead. It really is hitting rather strongly with a lot of people. Why do you think that is? That's been on the bestseller list forever, you know, very different circumstances, but same story, same song, right? Same song.

• 32:07Speaker 00

  I think we all want to fix our relationships with our parents. And I think we all want to connect about them. Because I do think we're sort of told that we're, we're supposed to have a certain kind of relationship with our parents. That we're supposed to, you know, love them and mourn them. And, but the reality is, a lot of us don't feel like that. And I think that there is a real, there's something nice about knowing that you don't have to be the daughter in the movies. That you can just have very mixed feelings about your parents. And I think most people do. I mean, my own kids are teenagers, and one is 20 something, and they are sometimes furious with me.

• 32:50Speaker 00

  And I say, that's good. That's what you're supposed to, that's how it's supposed to go.

• 32:55Kara Swisher?

  Two more questions about this. Do you think it made you a better? I think I'm a much better parent because I didn't have, my dad died, so he gets it out on that one. But do you think you're a better parent because of that? I do. I think I, and same thing with my brothers. They're fantastic parents, I would say.

• 33:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I definitely feel like I'm a better parent. I also get along like my brother, I love my brothers, my half-brothers.

• 33:19Kara Swisher?

  I love my brothers.

• 33:19Speaker 00

  Part of it is that I know when I used to get mad at my mom, she would be like, Kill me. I was the worst. And you're like, no, no, I just want to criticize you a little bit. And I just want to have like a real conversation about something. You know.

• 33:33Kara Swisher?

  You can't. They're impermeable.

• 33:34Speaker 00

  And so I do think what's nice is when my kids are gonna be like, you know, this wasn't the best moment for us, you know, and I'm sorry I gave you an eating disorder. Or, you know, those kind of things.

• 33:45Kara Swisher?

  I didn't.

• 33:46Speaker 00

  You know what I mean? But, you know, like, they're, they're, where they want to get mad at you about things. And so I do think I have, I can have that conversation with them.

• 33:55Kara Swisher?

  Being a better parent.

• 33:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:56Kara Swisher?

  Like designing a better parent. It's interesting because you can always, I'm almost like you could change at any point, but no, they actually can't. The last moment, you can't. They can't. What advice, Leslie, do you have for people with parents with dementia, Alzheimer's? There's so many parents that have this disease and they're working on it and working for solutions, but a lot of time, the health span lasts longer than the mind span. And so it creates a really difficult care situation. Even when you have means, it's hard. When you don't, it's even worse. But no matter what, it's a very difficult. So what, give me two pieces of advice.

• 34:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, don't be hard on yourself because everybody feels like they're not doing it the right way. I mean, I think that's uniformly true. You just do the best you can. I always think like, put the oxygen mask on yourself first, worry about your kids, and then your parent last. I really do. Because the kids, you only have the kids for such a short time, and then they grow up. I think you prioritize the kids before the parents. Just, that's my take. And then I also think, you just do the best you can. Like, you're not gonna, especially if they're sort of in that netherworld, there's only so much you can do. Sometimes they'll be mad at you for, I mean, the biggest lesson I've ever learned in my life is not to take things personally.

• 35:15Kara Swisher?

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:16Speaker 00

  Right? That people are doing what they're doing, and maybe it has to do with you, and, and often it doesn't.

• 35:21Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, no, often it doesn't.

• 35:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:23Kara Swisher?

  It's zero to do with you. It's with their own journey.

• 35:26Speaker 00

  That's the great joy of middle age, is knowing that it often doesn't have anything to do with you.

• 35:31Kara Swisher?

  Yeah. I often, I try not to feel bad, and I actually don't. Yeah. I like the cats in the cradle. I often say that to myself when my mother says something like, oh, you hate me. I'm like, cats in the fucking cradle. And she's like, what? I'm like, forget it. But it was just the Harry Chapin song about a parent who ignores a child and then later the child has no time for them.

• 35:54Speaker 00

  It's an anthem.

• 35:55Kara Swisher?

  It's an anthem.

• 35:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:59Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 36:07Kara Swisher?

  Support for this show comes from Indeed. When the pressure's on and you need to hire the right person for the job, Indeed Sponsored Jobs has got your back. Instead of forcing you to spend tons of time searching, Indeed Sponsored Jobs matches you with quality candidates fast. According to their data, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95% more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored jobs. Join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is the job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

• 36:49Kara Swisher?

  And listeners to the show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need the right hire fast? Then this is the job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

• 37:18Speaker 03

  What if you could run your Oracle databases everywhere you run your business? Good news, you can. Oracle AI Database runs in every major cloud, so you can use your live data for all your AI and analytics needs. Learn more at oracle.com/migrate.

• 37:34Speaker 05

  Hey y'all, it's Esteban from [email protected]. We know that you have big questions about the world, and so do we. At Vox, we focus on covering the things that matter in your life and the things that make you curious. Whether that's the big politics questions of the day, climate solutions that might actually work, or hopeful news in cancer or Alzheimer's research. We believe that journalism made for the everyday curious person can make a difference in making a better world. And if that sounds like something you want to be a part of, Vox now has a brand new app.

• 38:08Kara Swisher?

  It brings all of our journalism together in one place. Go to vox.com/app to download today. One of the things you've done is you've become a well-known person, too. You switched your career, I guess you self-launched into journalism in 2015, I would say. For people who don't know, you're a multi-hyphenate.

• 38:27Speaker 00

  Right.

• 38:28Kara Swisher?

  A social correspondent for Vanity Fair, a political analyst for MSNBC. You have a podcast, Fast Politics, on iHeart. The Times did a write-up on you a few years ago, and you attribute your success to a combination of prolific posting on social media, your kind of tell-like-it-is brand, your personal connections of being a neposaurus, as you've called yourself. I'm not so sure you're riding off the back of Erica John.

• 38:49Speaker 00

  Not at this point.

• 38:50Kara Swisher?

  Not at this point. So, talk a little bit about that shift for you.

• 38:54Speaker 00

  So, I had all these kids. I wrote novels. I had all these kids. I went back into writing. I started writing columns in 2015. I went to the place where I had written when I was like a kid and just wrote every week and wrote these political columns. I just had a realization that I didn't have to write about myself anymore, that I could write about politics, was much more interesting, and had nothing to do with me as a person in the world.

• 39:21Kara Swisher?

  Other things.

• 39:22Speaker 00

  Other things. I also think what happened to me was when Obama came into presidency, I thought, oh, okay, it's gonna be okay, right? Like, we're gonna fix all the stuff now, where the really smart people are gonna get in government and they're gonna fix stuff. And then I thought, and then Hillary's gonna be president, and this'll all sort of work out. And then it was like, oh, no, none of this is gonna work out. And that got me involved in writing about politics.

• 39:52Kara Swisher?

  Right. And Trump was starting to be ascendant, correct?

• 39:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:55Kara Swisher?

  Is that what inspired you, Trump, or?

• 39:58Speaker 00

  I think I thought, I think the way it happened, where he sort of got in there, and the party was, the Republican Party was like, no. And then he was able to sort of defy gravity, was very much as a novelist, because I feel like originally I was a novelist. That really captured my imagination, not in a good way, in a sort of, you know, as someone with both an anxiety disorder and an eye for drama, but also satire, it was a cataclysmic moment in American life. And I think it was for a lot of people.

• 40:33Kara Swisher?

  You didn't come up as a journalist. You said you came up as a novelist. And a lot of, according to a Pew study, one in five Americans regularly get their news from news influencers on social media. It's a higher percentage among younger generations. What do you consider yourself? Because you didn't come up the journalistic route, like I definitely did. How do you define what you're doing? Because you're also in traditional media. You definitely check the box of the traditional media. But how do you look at yourself as a writer?

• 41:01Speaker 00

  I think of myself as an opinion journalist. So it tends to be that you come through journalism, but there are opinion journalists who come through other activities. So I think of myself as an opinion journalist who is more interested in prose than perhaps a more traditional journalist. But I have spent enough time now in that world that I'm very careful, which is good.

• 41:28Kara Swisher?

  Right, you're a co about making mistakes and everything else. But do you consider yourself a news influencer? You use social media quite a bit. You know, you really do compared to other people. You're on all of them. You're still on X, even though you shouldn't be. You're on Blue Sky, TikTok. You're on YouTube with Fast Politics. How do you fashion your life and how do you do it?

• 41:47Speaker 00

  So what I would say is there are two things I aspire to do, right? Make sense of what's happening and also make people feel better. Those are really the two jobs. And so I try to read everything. Everything comes from reporting or from sources. And there's really good reporting coming from The Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and even, you know, ProPublica, The Economist. So I just read everything. I talk to as many people as I possibly can. I also, one of my favorite things I do, which you're not supposed to do, but I do do, is I complain to comms people about the many things that I think their bosses are doing wrong, which makes me.

• 42:31Speaker 00

  Profoundly disliked, but I do do that where I say, you know, I'm really disappointed. And I do this Jewish mother thing, which I do with my kids. Where I say, I'm really disappointed that your boss can't speak. Like, my new thing is I feel the Democrats should be speaking like normal humans. That I feel like that would make them more effective.

• 42:51Kara Swisher?

  So in that way, you're more an influencer, correct? I mean, I'm trying to sort of, how you describe yourself to people, a columnist, a columnist.

• 42:58Speaker 00

  I think of myself as a political columnist on the opinion side.

• 43:02Kara Swisher?

  On the opinion side. So it's interesting, because your grandfather, Howard Vass, is known for writing Spartacus. He was also a communist and spent time in prison for pleading the Fifth before the House Un-American Activities Committee under McCarthyism, and went to exile in Mexico for a while. And as we talked about, Fear of Flying was published in 1973, the same year that Supreme Court determined Roe. And writing about women's sexuality was a political act. Even if you say your mother wasn't political, it certainly was. She got a lot of pushback. But she also wrote about her time in Heidelberg in the 60s, how Germans were ignoring the recent Nazi past. Do you think about your job like that? Because you certainly come from a legacy of that.

• 43:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, and actually, my grandfather was a political columnist, too. So he wrote these novels that were very sort of-

• 43:44Kara Swisher?

  The Heschens. I remember the Heschens. I remember that.

• 43:47Speaker 00

  Right. Heavily and didactic novels about liberalism and communism. And he wrote political columns. So he had that similar thing where he was both things. And he was sort of a public intellectual, for lack of a better word. Though he was not a high-level public inter- you know, he wasn't Buckley or Gore Vidal. He was like, this sort of Timu Buckley. Or, well, not Buckley, but Timu Gore Vidal, but not gay.

• 44:15Kara Swisher?

  Oh, Gore Vidal. There you go, Grandpa.

• 44:17Speaker 00

  But he tried to be a public intellectual. So that was sort of an avenue that was available. I don't know that that's an avenue that is available. I don't know how intellectual I am. But I just want to say one other thing about my grandfather, which is, he was jailed. He was definitely a communist. He did refuse to name names. He did win the Stalin Peace Prize. The last year that Stalin was giving it out.

• 44:44Speaker 00

  Which is really a dubious honor, I would say, at best. Um, my father found the Stalin Peace Prize in the garage.

• 44:52Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 44:53Speaker 00

  And was like, oh, my God, and he dropped it, and now he can't find it again.

• 44:57Kara Swisher?

  Oh, no.

• 44:58Speaker 00

  So the family has a very conflicted relationship.

• 45:02Kara Swisher?

  That might be a good prize to lose, I would say.

• 45:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:05Kara Swisher?

  Turned out Stalin.

• 45:05Speaker 00

  I was a little bit curious to see it, but it's like a coin. I've seen it before. But I did have this amazing moment with my brother, and I said to him, you know, I, Trump could put me in jail.

• 45:17Kara Swisher?

  Right, I was gonna ask about that.

• 45:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:19Kara Swisher?

  So you've obviously been very outspoken about President Trump. You said you were worried about what happened if he's reelected. A lot of people are.

• 45:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:24Kara Swisher?

  Are you feeling that way? And when you think about these moments in history, Nazi Germany, McCarthyism, MAGA America, how do you assess where we are right now? Are you personally worried still? A lot, some people are.

• 45:35Speaker 00

  Well, the best moment is my, my brother goes like, you better hope that you get put in jail, because that was the best thing that ever happened to grandpa.

• 45:42Kara Swisher?

  Oh.

• 45:42Speaker 00

  And he was, he was like, grandpa got next level when he was put in jail.

• 45:47Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, oh, no.

• 45:48Speaker 00

  You know? So he was like, you better pray that you get on that level.

• 45:53Kara Swisher?

  How do you feel about that?

• 45:54Speaker 00

  Um, I feel okay. I mean, look, I think that it's the closest to McCarthyism, right? I think the straightest line is McCarthyism. I do think what's really amazing about Trumpism is two things. One, he's not so good at this.

• 46:10Kara Swisher?

  Mm-huh.

• 46:11Speaker 00

  Right, that is what's so striking. For example, these law firms that went along with Trump, a lot of them are now getting pushback from their clients. So I do actually think that, um, I, I actually feel a little better because I think that even though a lot of billionaires have really caved to him in a disgusting way that was shocking, but it turned out it wasn't necessary. Like, they could have just pushed back and survived. And so I feel like it's a really amazing cautionary tale for, for all of us, which is that you can be brave and you can do the right thing. And there's no incentive, in fact, for caving.

• 46:52Kara Swisher?

  So you're feeling More hopeful that there is push, Pope Shrock is occurring. That said, I want to finish up talking about the Democrats. You wrote an article in Vanity Fair about President Joe Biden just after his cancer diagnosis was announced. This was personal because your husband's cancer treatment, you wrote, "One of my few positive aspects of being a cancer family is that you really get connected to your many and humanity of people around you. Cancer is nonpartisan." But still, there's a lot of stir and drag around how he, hand wringing and blame gaming within the Democratic Party. In March, you wrote, "A party's very existence relies on elevating a new suite of leaders." So, talk a little bit about, if there's been pushback, how do you think, why do you think elected Democrats are having a hard time figuring out what to do to show they're relevant and that they're actually doing something to stop this slide away from democracy?

• 47:36Speaker 00

  Look, Trump is Trump. Republicans caved to him. They set this in motion. Democrats had a hard time trying to push back on these authoritarian impulses. Part of it was because it's very hard to be sort of the one party that believes in norms and institutions. That's an impossible situation to be in. Part of it was that they really got in their own ways. You know, they thought too much about themselves. You know, like, a lot of times you'll hear, people will say, "Well, it's the online left that is having too much power." But I actually think that it's not. I actually think that the problem isn't, I mean, maybe at one time it was, but I think really the problem now is the consultant class that gets in there

• 48:18Speaker 00

  and says, "You can't say this. You can't say that. You have to be careful. You shouldn't do that interview. You shouldn't do this interview." Like, if we learn anything from Donald Trump, Donald Trump went everywhere. He said crazy stuff. It didn't matter, right? Because you have so little of people's attention, and you just have to be everywhere. And I think one of the worst moments for me was those Google searches on Election Day where people didn't know that Joe Biden had dropped out of the race. Like, this is a country of 300-plus million people. They are not reading the newspaper. They are not, like, you just have to get in front of them any way you can. And it doesn't matter if your message is brilliantly tailored or not.

• 49:00Speaker 00

  And in fact, I think the worst thing Democrats do for, to themselves is talking points. You know, like, there is, there are some really, really smart Democrats who you can't hear what they have to say because they are like, you know, McKinsey talking point to McKinsey talking point. And I actually think just talking like a human to another human is the way to go.

• 49:22Kara Swisher?

  Who do you think that's going to be? You, you interviewed Vice President Kamala Harris for Vanity Fair in 2022. You were a supporter through the presidential campaign. But who do you think should be the Democratic ticket? How, how are you looking at, when you're starting to assess? Because people will be now focused on 2026 and 2028.

• 49:40Speaker 00

  First of all, I think that the really, they should have a really strong primary process where everybody gets out there and is on the stage and is taking, is having the conversation, as many people as possible. And they should, and those people, I don't know who the pick should be, but I think that the pick should be someone who goes everywhere, who goes on Theo Von and the Milk Boys and who goes on Joe Rogan and who will literally go on everything. There is no path to the presidency that doesn't lead to every single news influencer, even the ones you don't like. The one thing I think the online left did really, really wrong, and I am guilty of

• 50:22Speaker 00

  this too, and I think it was a huge mistake, is the idea that you should only go on things that agree with you. You should go on everything. You should go on the Fox and Fox and Friends and everything you don't, Newsmax, everything you don't like, whatever the most, you know, objectionable, even if you don't ideologically jive with it, even if you feel that they say bad things about vaccines, you should go on everything. That's my feeling.

• 50:51Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, it's interesting because you do reach people, you know, as opposed to your mom. My mom loves. Fox News.

• 50:56Speaker 00

  Right.

• 50:57Kara Swisher?

  You don't have that nightmare to deal with.

• 50:59Speaker 00

  Thank God. But the one thing I would say also is like Newsom did a podcast and what he did, which was wrong, was he platformed those people. What he should have done is gone on Charlie Kirk's podcast, not brought Charlie Kirk to his people. So go on their podcast, don't necessarily bring them to yours.

• 51:19Kara Swisher?

  Mm-hmm. Come to your house. Go to their house.

• 51:21Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 51:22Kara Swisher?

  So are you feeling, you seem like you're feeling more confident. Where do you feel we are right now in this process? And then I have a final question about your mom.

• 51:31Speaker 00

  So here's what I would say. I would have been really, really incredibly worried had Democrats lost that judicial election in Wisconsin because that would have been, I think, game over. The fact that Elon Musk poured 30 million plus, plus, plus into it and they lost, I think is a big deal. If Democrats can win back the House in the midterms and the elections go off without a hitch, then I will feel pretty confident. That said, there needs to be a huge reckoning within the Democratic Party. The gerontocracy has to be dealt with.

• 52:12Speaker 00

  They need to elevate people who are good communicators and not just their friends. They have a real problem with connecting with voters. I think a lot of it has to do with just their reliance on traditional media and their inability to get out of their comfort zones. But I do think that's a real thing. I am worried still. I think there has to be new anti-corruption laws that come into place. There has to be more focus on norms and institutions. There has, I mean, there certainly are things I'm quite worried about, but I do think that there, I mean, I'm sort of 60/40 that it's going to be okay. You know, I wrote these pieces about what I got wrong during the 2024 cycle and one

• 52:57Speaker 00

  of the things I really did discover is that I'm a little overly optimistic. So, you know, but I, I'm, I, I still see a way through.

• 53:06Kara Swisher?

  I have one final question. One of the things that's interesting is when we talk about politics, you become very confident and come alive in a lot of ways. And when you were talking about your mom, you were sort of regretful about what you might have done here. Why is that?

• 53:22Speaker 00

  I did this book because I thought it was what I should be doing. I don't love talking about myself. I'm not so interested in it. I'm not so interesting. And I also don't, I mean, look, I matter in the fact that there are interesting things to take from my experience, which I think can help people. But I don't, I don't love to talk about myself. And I don't think that I am so uni-, you know, I grew up in a very weird way. I'm largely an only child. I'm an alcoholic. You're a sober alcoholic, but an alcoholic. I just think my experience is very sort of siloed and weird. But I think that story is interesting and people can relate to it. Whereas I'm quite interested in what's going to happen in American politics because it's going to affect all of us.

• 54:06Kara Swisher?

  Yeah. All right. On that note, well, thank you, Molly. Thank you. Thank you.

• 54:16Kara Swisher?

  On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castro-Rosell, Kateri Yokum, Dave Shaw, Megan Burney, Allison Rogers, and Kalen Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Maura Fox and Catherine Barner. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Aruda, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you get to stay at the world's most expensive nursing home. If not, you're a neposaurus. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.