Colm Toibin: Writers and Their Families

In his latest book, New Ways to Kill Your Mother, Colm Tóibín ranges from the importance of aunts (and the death of parents) in the English nineteenth-century novel to the relationship between fathers and sons in the writing of James Baldwin and Barack Obama, illuminating not only the intimate connections between writers and their families but also articulating, with a rare tenderness and wit, the great joy of reading their work.

Chaired by Susan Mansfield.