“A happy childhood,” Colm Tóibín tells us, “may make good citizens, but it is not a help for those of us facing a blank page.” Withholding or meddlesome fathers, control-freak mothers, siblings whose sexual hijinks would make polite society shudder—these are the stimuli that fill blank pages with art. And Tóibín in New Ways to Kill Your Mother (Scribner) mines this potent field of twisted and troublesome literary families for all it’s worth.
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