In How to Lose Your Mother, the journalist recalls caring for her mother, novelist Erica Jong, as she succumbed to dementia.

When did you know you’d write about this awful year of your life?

Because I was on TV and so active on X, publishers wanted me to do a book, but I didn’t want to do a throwaway book, because I have respect for books. One publisher came to me with an idea for a dumb book about how women stopped Donald Trump. And I was like, Oh, I don’t want to write that; that sounds stupid. It would have aged like milk in the sun. Then my mom started getting dementia. I said to my agent, “Maybe I want to write this book instead.” While I was having meetings, my husband got diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I’m pretty good at not falling apart, but I was literally in the taxi going to Morning Joe weeping. I bristle at the idea of writing as therapy, because I think most content that’s produced that way is terrible, but I did it. It was the only way I could process what was happening to me.

You had a complicated relationship with your mother. What’s your favorite memory of her?

We had a lot of great trips. She wrote in Italian, and they loved her in Italy, so going to Italy with her was like going with a movie star. She was so narcissistic and so wrapped up in fame, but she so loved talking to people; she would talk to an Italian taxi driver for 25 minutes.

In many ways, this is a memoir focused on other people. What did you learn about yourself while writing it?

That I’m very sane. I don’t know that I earned that. I think it’s probably because I’ve been sober a long time. That said, I also have some stuff from my childhood that is really unhelpful, especially when it comes to entitlement. I think I’ve been more stuck in my childhood than is normal.

What do you hope readers take away from the book?

That you can get through it. If I kept everything really small, I could get through anything. People would be like, I can’t believe you’re going through this. And I would say, first of all, better people than me have gone through wars. People have lived in death camps. This is not that, there’s always been worse. And as long as things are very small, I can get through it. I have really triaged my life. I want people to read this book and be like, my spouse has this, my this has that, but I know that I can eat an ice cream and go to bed at nine o’clock and wake up, and tomorrow will be a new day.