Publisher's Synopsis
In this fascinating, informative, and entertaining collection, internationally acclaimed, award-winning author Colm Tóibìn turns his attention to the intricacies of family relationships in literature and writing.
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, Colm Tóibìn illuminates not only the intimate connections between writers and their families but also, with wit and rare tenderness, articulates the great joy of reading their work. In the piece on the Notebooks of Tennessee Williams, Tóibìn reveals an artist "alone and deeply fearful and unusually selfish" and one profoundly tormented by his sister's mental illness. Through the relationship between W.B. Yeats and his father, or Thomas Mann and his children, or J.M. Synge and his mother, Tóibìn examines a world of family relations, richly comic or savage in its implications. In Roddy Doyle's writing on his parents we see an Ireland reinvented. From the dreams and nightmares of John Cheever's journals Tóibìn makes flesh this darkly comic misanthrope and his relationship to his wife and his children.The majority of these pieces were previously published in the Londron Review of Books, the New York Review Review of Books, and the Dublin Review. Three of the thirteen pieces have never appeared before.
