YouSaid · the spoken record

Molly Jong-Fast

lines on the record: 59
first: 2025-06-23
most recent: 2025-06-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“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 conversations. I'd be like, you know, I know you say you love me so much.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 piece. Like all I wanted was to have the kind of relationship with my mother that I have with my daughter. 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.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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 Fast, 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 his hamburger. Like the body is not the person.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think, I actually think that the universe was telling me that you can, and this is the message of that book. And it's funny because this is a message of the book. There's a lot about my mom. And I think people are very interested in that relationship.”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Turned out to be the good cancer. Yeah. 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. It just was like this craziness. There was this one moment where we were at this 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?”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. The wheels fell off. He ended up back and forth in the hospital because he had dementia and Parkinson's. And then she ended up, 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?”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Case even more beautiful So basically, one of my friends who is also Jewish read it and she said to me, and I feel like it's a Jewish beechreed. Like, you read a very fast. It's fun to read, but it is very dark. Yeah. 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”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Did the thing that I had been taught to do when writing, which was to get on the page and open a vein? And that was how my mom did it, and that was how that was sort of, and everything else, I feel like I can't, you know, either people like it or don't. Do you know what I mean?”
2025-06-23 · On with Kara Swisher · Molly Jong-Fast on How to Survive Anything · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT