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New ways to kill your mother : writers and their families / Colm Toibin.

by Tóibín, Colm, 1955-

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New York : Scribner, 2012.

Authors -- Family relationships.

9781451668551 (hbk.) :

1451668554 (hbk.)

345 p. ; 23 cm.

1st Scribner hardcover ed.

Jane Austen, Henry James, and the death of the mother - -Ireland. W.B. Yeats : new ways to kill your father ; Willie and George ; New ways to kill your mother : Synge and his family ; Beckett meets his afflicted mother ; Brian Moore : out of Ireland have I come, great hatred, little room ; Sebastian Barry's fatherland ; Roddy Doyle and Hugo Hamilton : the dialect of the tribe -- Elsewhere. Thomas Mann : new ways to spoil your children ; Borges : a father in his shadow ; Hart Crane : escape from home ; Tennessee Williams and the ghost of Rose ; John Cheever : new ways to make your family's life a misery ; Baldwin and "the American confusion" ; Baldwin and Obama : men without fathers.

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 flesh 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.

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