New Ways to Kill Your Mother : Writers and Their Families

In his essay on Tennessee Williams, noted gay writer Colm Toibin reveals an artist profoundly tormented by his sister's mental illness. Through the relationship between W.B. Yeats and his father, Toibin examines a world of family relations, and in Roddy Doyle's writing on his parents illuminates an Ireland reinvented. From John Cheever's journals, Toibin makes flesh this darkly comic misanthrope (with homosexual tendencies) - "Educating an intellectual woman," Cheever remarked, "is like letting a rattlesnake into the house." In pieces that range from the importance of aunts (and the death of parents) in the English nineteenth-century novel to the relationship between fathers and sons in the writing of James Baldwin and Barack Obama, the fiercely intelligent Toibin illuminates not only the intimate connections between writers and their families but also articulates, with a rare tenderness and wit, the great joy of reading their work.
Also check out Colm Toibin's other best-selling writings.

Paperback, 352 Pages, Published 2012