Colm Toibin: killing parents
Start the Week on Radio 4 this morning made me seethe. Colm Toibín and Will Eaves were both talking about the family. Colm, a wonderful essayist, has already produced a great set of mother-killing scripts in an earlier book, Mothers and Sons . Now he seems to be plundering both that and his other fabulous work on Henry James, to go over and over the same idea: to liberate yourself you must effectively kill your parents. Will Eaves at least managed to come up with a rather brilliant rebuttal of why biographical readings of novels are always wrong: you start with a seed based in the reality of a family, and it combines with a fantasy. And it is the job of the novelist to craft a freestanding structure out of those two interdependent things. I love his emphasis on the craft of writing, remembering that it is a labour, that writers are journeymen, travelling between market towns to sell their hard work. Why, then, was I so affronted by two gentlemen talking about the craft of wri...