Jong has remarked that her work on her personal memoir, Fear of Fifty (1994), led her to become interested in exploring her family's history. The research began with her grandfather's stories of his emigration from pre-revolutionary Russia, and it included her disappointing trip to Odessa, while it was still a Soviet city, to search for some traces of the family's roots. Jong's treatment of these materials, however, gradually changed, shifted, and matured into the novel Inventing Memory.

The remembered stories of her grandfather's early life underwent a complete transformation to become the fourgenerational saga of the struggles of Jewish mothers and daughters who seek fulfillment through love, art, work, and motherhood.

Another earlier literary interest of Jong's also plays a role in Inventing Memory: the novelist Henry Miller. When Fear of Flying was published in 1973, Miller hailed the book as a woman's version of his own ground-breaking...