New Ways to Kill Your Mother by Colm Tóibín: review In July 1907, the mother of the playwright John Synge read a review of his new play, The Playboy of the Western World, in the Irish Times. She did not like the sound of it, writing in her diary, "I was troubled about John's play - not nice." Half a century later, the novelist Brian Moore's mother read his novel The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. She too was not impressed. "You certainly left nothing to the imagination," she wrote to him, "and my advice to you in your next book is to leave out parts like that." Most of the time Yeats didn't bother to reply, but when he did his verdicts must have struck like icicles to the heart. "The least good of all your writings," he wrote of one play, with the clear implication that the rest weren't up to much either. "It is," Tóibín writes, "as if Oedipus, Herod and some third force out of Freud's dark laboratory joined forces." The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges didn't murder his mother on paper, but he may well have felt like doing so in real life. In 1967 Borges, then aged 68, married a woman called Elsa Astete. Borges didn't love Elsa - he didn't even like her much - but he didn't dare contradict his mother, who thought she would make a suitable bride. On their wedding night, Borges insisted on sleeping in his old single bed, leaving his mother to escort Elsa to the bus stop. The next morning the maid went in and asked Borges how he'd slept. He looked up at her, smiled and said, "I dreamed all night that I was hanging out of a tram." But if there were a prize for operatic dysfunction in a writer's family, it would surely go to Thomas Mann. When Mann's son, Klaus - or "Eissi" as he was known in the family - was 14, his father saw him in his swimming trunks and wrote in his diary, "Am enraptured with Eissi... Found it quite natural that I should have fallen in love with my son." Klaus grew up to be a writer. He was also gay like his father - or like his father was most of the time. So was Klaus's sister Erika, although she did marry WH Auden (who was also gay). Both Klaus and another of his brothers committed suicide, as Thomas Mann's sisters had done. In 1948, Klaus tried, unsuccessfully, to kill himself by slitting his wrists, taking pills and turning on the gas. When his mother heard the news, she is reported to have snapped, "If he wanted to kill himself, why didn't he do it properly?" There is, however, far more to New Ways to Kill Your Mother than just a collection of anecdotes. It's a consistently revealing look at how writers" relationships with their families have influenced their work. It also sheds some fascinating light on Tóibín himself. As anybody familiar with his novels will know, he's got plenty of mother issues of his own. Like his hero Henry James - whose fictional mothers also tend to be dead or conveniently offstage - you can sense him enacting his own drama of separation and self-invention. Delicacy is one of Tóibín's great strengths as a novelist, and it's here in abundance, too. Parallels are adroitly, teasingly drawn out, then knotted together with the lightest of touches. The result is a book that illuminates, startles and delights. New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and their Families Colm Tóibín Viking, £20, 340pp