Conflicted writers struggling for self-expression in an uncaring age

Colm Tóibín must have come up with one of the catchiest book titles of the year: New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families.

He’s rifled through the letters, notebooks, memoirs and speechifying of some of the great names of literature from the last two centuries — including Jane Austen, Thomas Mann, Hart Crane and WB Yeats, whose father lived until the poet was in his late 50s — for his collection of essays.