You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
A happy childhood may make good citizens, but it's not a help for those of us facing a blank page. — Tóibín (p. 174)
I am talking about gossip in its highest and purest form. … — Diana Athill (p. 143)
Starting with the outrageous title for this collection of biographical sketches of creative writers, Colm Tóibín seems to want to engage us by tugging at our own wishes for matricide. Written for various journals over a period of years, these essays vary widely in purpose, tone, style, focus, and with what facets of the writers’ lives they deal. That said, what could be more heinously pleasurable than to learn about new ways to kill our mothers? The title itself invites us to a how-to aimed at educating a titillated reader about the various techniques devised by “writers and their families” for emotional and intrapsychic matricide.
If there is thematic glue binding these disparate pieces—engrossing, digressive, unsystematic, and at times confusingly meandering—it is expressed by Tóibín's fascination with the distressed and unhappy lives of creative writers and the “help” they are afforded “facing a blank page.” Tóibín acquaints us with a group of truly troubled adult children confronting an equal match in their unhappy family members. For some psychotherapists and analysts, the book will be a busman's holiday. Along with the unhappiness, Tóibín would have us witness the writer's inevitably human desire to hurt, take revenge, and kill the perceived offenders, be they parents, children, or their proxies, from whom they want some freedom, some space, and air to breathe.
Tóibín arranges the collection in two parts, “Part One: Ireland” and “Part Two: Elsewhere,” prefaced by a scholarly introduction. This two-part structure recapitulates how many Irish authors managed what was felt to be an oppressive relationship with mother Ireland by dividing their lives, as Tóibín does the book, between Ireland and Elsewhere.
“Part One: Ireland” has as its subjects W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, S