Tóibín turns his critical eye on the forces and families that shape writers

New Ways to Kill Your Mother

By contrast, to read his critical output — which exceeds that of his fiction — is to witness a sophisticated mind tackling the same concerns for style and social pressures but with a more journalistic urgency and regard for the general reader.

This volume, a study of those families where “discussion of art” is “part of emotional life”, collects 15 lectures, reviews, and essays into a surprisingly cohesive package. In it, Tóibín challenges our tendency to stereotype writers as tortured loners. Instead he rightly claims every artist to be a product of the social and cultural forces prevalent in their age, of which the family, even escaped or rejected, is often the most powerful.