New Ways to Kill Your Mother

New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families, di Colm Tóibín (Viking). In questa sua nuova raccolta di saggi Tóibín esamina la relazione di alcuni scrittori con i loro genitori. E anche la sua, con sua madre, "It mattered to her [his mother] that she could have, or might have, been a writer, and perhaps it mattered to me more than I fully understood. She watched my books appear with considerable interest, and wrote me an oddly formal letter about the style of each one, but she was, I knew, also uneasy about my novels. She found them too slow and sad and oddly personal. She was careful not to say too much about this, except once when she felt that I had described her and things which had happened to her too obviously and too openly. That time she said that she might indeed soon write her own book. She made a book sound like a weapon. Perhaps a book is a weapon; perhaps an unwritten book is an even more powerful weapon than one which has been published. It has a way of filling the air with its menace or its promise, the sweet art of what might have been. guardian.