Murray Ewing's Reviews > New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families

New Ways to Kill Your Mother collects some of Colm Tóibín’s biographical essays about writers, including Henry James, W B Yeats, Synge, Beckett, Thomas Mann, Borges, Hart Crane, Tennessee Williams, John Cheever and James Baldwin, focusing (as that attention-grabbing title suggests) on familial relations. And not just maternal ones. The opening essay, which I found the best in the book, “Jane Austen, Henry James and the Death of the Mother” explores the uses of aunts in literature, and surprised me by proving they do in fact have a use. Acting as mothers-who-aren’t-mothers, the aunt has a licence to be either horrible or ineffective as a substitute parent, without seeming as awful as a horrible/ineffective mother would. Aunts, then, are like step mothers in fairy tales - placeholders where mothers should be, allowing the writer a freedom that having a mother as a character wouldn’t allow.

Elsewhere, there are absent fathers — the final essay, “Baldwin and Obama: Men Without Fathers”, points out similarities in the autobiographies of James Baldwin and Barack Obama, starting with how both begin the telling of their life stories with the deaths of their fathers. Meanwhile, W B Yeats’ father — who writes a play late in life and decides that his son ought to come to him for writing advice, now — sounds like he’d make a wonderful comic character, though not a great father, really. The essay on Thomas Mann is more about Mann himself as a father… Ick. Let’s just say that writers as fathers, in this book (John Cheever is another), don’t come across too well.

Tóibín doesn’t draw many overall conclusions about writers’ relations with their families, but certainly presents enough examples to show how profoundly these relationships affect writers and their works. Which I suppose is almost too obvious a thing to say, but is an endlessly fascinating subject, all the same.