Colm Tóibín is fascinated by writers’ relationships with their families. In New Ways to Kill Your Mother, a series of review-essays, he works away at and through his obsessions: family, homosexuality, homeland, the anxiety of influence. Along the way, he tells us plenty about himself, such as what he thinks a novel is, or should be – a “set of strategies, closer to something in mathematics or quantum physics than something in ethics or sociology” – as well as much else besides about the psychology of serious literary ambition.
