In a brilliant, nuanced and wholly original collection of essays, the novelist and critic Colm Tóibín explores the relationships of writers to their families and their work.
From Jane Austen’s aunts to Tennessee Williams’s mentally ill sister, the impact of intimate family dynamics can be seen in many of literature’s greatest works. Tóibín, celebrated both for his award-winning fiction and his provocative book reviews and essays, and currently the Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Columbia, traces and interprets those intriguing, eccentric, often twisted family ties in New Ways to Kill Your Mother. Through the relationship between W. B. Yeats and his father, Thomas Mann and his children, and J. M. Synge and his mother, Tóibín examines a world of relations, richly comic or savage in its implications. In Roddy Doyle’s writing on his parents, Tóibín perceives an Ireland reinvented. From the dreams and nightmares of John Cheever’s journals, Tóibín illuminates this darkly comic misanthrope and his relationship to his wife and his children. “Educating an intellectual woman,” Cheever remarked, “is like letting a rattlesnake into the house.” Acutely perceptive and imbued with rare tenderness and wit, New Ways to Kill Your Mother is a fascinating look at writers’ most influential bonds and a secret key to understanding and enjoying their work.
About Colm Toibin
Colm Toibin was born in Ireland in 1955. He is the author of six novels including The Blackwater Lightship, The Master, winner of a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Brooklyn, winner of a Costa Book Award. Twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Toibin lives in Dublin and New York.
Editorial Reviews
“Toibin is an excellent guide through the dark terrain of unconscious desires.”—The Evening Standard
“A consistently revealing look at how writers’ relationships with their families have influenced their work…Delicacy is one of Toibin’s great strengths as a novelist, and it’s here in abundance, too. Parallels are adroitly, teasingly drawn out, then knotted together with the lightest of touches. The result is a book that illuminates, startles and delights.”—The Telegraph
Not a Title That’s Meant for Mom
The New York Times Book Review – June 11, 2012 (Excerpt)
The title of the Irish novelist Colm Toibin’s nonfiction book, “New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families,” is so vivid that it feels churlish to point out that a more accurate one would be something like: “Side Work: Recent Book Reviews, Essays and Odd Bits.”
Compiling this material as “New Ways to Kill Your Mother” is somewhat like titling the contents of a jukebox “Love the One You’re With: Inquiries Along the Sexual Highway.” It’s brazen. ButMr. Toibin mostly gets away with it. He’s an intense and moody thinker about books and writers, and these short pieces have subterranean echoes.
Mr. Toibin is best known for novels that include “The Master” (2004), about Henry James, and “Brooklyn”(2009). He’s also written plays, books of travel writing and a volume about the lives of fellow gay artists. His criticism appears in The London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books, where much of this book’s contents first appeared. He’s an old-fashioned literary man o’ war.
He’s known, as well, for a certain asceticism. He writes inthe most uncomfortable chair imaginable. “It keeps me awake,” he has said. The chapters in “New Ways to Kill Your Mother” share that asceticism. They’re pared down and plain-spoken. Mr. Toibin does not own a high style. What he does own is vast understanding of fiction and its uses, and a mind that processes novels and ideas like a rumbling supercomputer. [Read the full article...]
“New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families” by Colm Toibin
The Washington Post Book Review – August 17, 2012 (Excerpt)
Back when I was writing fiction, the father of a well-known novelist expressed condolences to my parents, noting that it took fortitude for them to face permutations of themselves in print. I often think of this when reading Julian Barnes, whose depictions of his mother, even years after her death, are so unflattering. No, lethal.
The complicated, sometimes difficult relationships between writers and their families are the focus of the 15literary essays in Colm Toibin’s archly titled new book, “New Ways to Kill Your Mother.” Writers, he maintains in this juicy collection, have to break away from and repudiate their families in order to gain the necessary independence to write freely.
Toibin’s novels and stories, which include “Brooklyn” and “The Empty Family,” are often set at least partly in Enniscorthy, Ireland, his home town, and involve fraught family dynamics and monstrous mothers. “A happy childhood may make good citizens, but it is not a help for those of us facing a blank page,” he writes. Many of his essays, along with those in an earlier collection, “Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives From Wilde to Almodovar,” focus on homosexual writers and artists. [Read the full article...]
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