New ways to kill your mother
Subtitle: writers and their families
By: Colm Toibin
Edition: 1st Scribner hardcover ed.
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2012
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 345
ISBN-13: 9781451668551; 9781451668568; 9781451668575
Subjects: Family relationships; Authors
Description: In his essay on Tennessee Williams, the author reveals an artist profoundly tormented by his sister's mental illness. Through the relationship between W.B. Yeats and his father, he examines a world of family relations, and in Roddy Doyle's writing on his parents illuminates an Ireland reinvented. From John Cheever's journals he makes fresh this darkly comic misanthrope and his intimates. 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 author illuminates the intimate connections between writers and their families, but also articulates the great joy of reading their work.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.