New Ways to Kill Your Mother

Acknowledgements

‘Jane Austen and the Death of the Mother’ was given as the Troy Lecture at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in December 2010 and a version of it later published in the London Review of Books; ‘W. B. Yeats: New Ways to Kill Your Father’ was first given as a lecture at the Yeats Summer School in Sligo in 2004 and subsequently published in the Dublin Review; ‘Willie and George’ was first published in the London Review of Books; ‘New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Synge and his Family’ was first published in Synge: A Celebration, edited by Colm Tóibín; ‘Beckett Meets His Afflicted Mother’ and ‘Brian Moore: Out of Ireland Have I Come, Great Hatred, Little Room’ were first published in the London Review of Books; ‘Sebastian Barry’s Fatherland’ was first published in Out of History: Essays on the Writings of Sebastian Barry, edited by Christina Hunt Mahony; ‘Roddy Doyle and Hugo Hamilton: The Dialect of the Tribe’ was first published in the New York Review of Books; ‘Thomas Mann: New Ways to Spoil Your Children’ and ‘Borges: A Father in his Shadow’ were first published in the London Review of Books; ‘Hart Crane: Escape from Home’ and ‘Tennessee Williams and the Ghost of Rose’ were first published in the New York Review of Books; ‘John Cheever: New Ways to Make Your Family’s Life a Misery’ was first published in the London Review of Books; ‘Baldwin and “the American Confusion” was given as a lecture at Queen Mary University of London in June 2007 and later published in the Dublin Review; ‘Baldwin and Obama: Men Without Fathers’ was first published in the New York Review of Books.

I am grateful to the editors who published these pieces — especially to Mary Kay Wilmers and Daniel Soar at the London Review of Books; to Robert Silvers, and the late Barbara Epstein, at the New York Review of Books; and to Brendan Barrington at the Dublin Review. Also thanks to Angela Rohan for her work as an editor on the manuscript; and to Mary Mount, Ben Brusey and Keith Taylor at Penguin in London; to Nan Graham, Susan Muldow and Paul Whitlatch at Scribner in New York; and to Ellen Seligman at McClelland and Stewart in Toronto; also to my agent Peter Straus, and to Aidan Dunne, Catriona Crowe, Peggy O’Brien, Joseph Bartholomeo, Christina Hunt Mahony, Jonathan Allison, Cora Kaplan, Bill Schwartz, Lilian Chambers and Garry Hynes. I am especially grateful to the late Professor William Murphy for his kindness and encouragement when I worked on the letters of John Butler Yeats, which he had so painstakingly assembled, and which are kept in the Special Collections in the Library of Union College in Schenectady.