Paul Theroux’s Darkest Travel Book Is Set at Home

The travel writer Paul Theroux has taken us through Asia, Central and South America, Africa, and the Mediterranean. But his new book, “Mother Land,” is set as close to home as possible: in Theroux’s home town of Medford, Massachusetts, in a family that closely resembles his own. “Mother Land” tells the story of a self-absorbed matriarch presiding over quarelling siblings, using gossip, secrets, and favoritism to keep her subjects divided—like “Chairman Mao, or Pol Pot,” Theroux observes. He freely admits that it’s autobiographical, and tells The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, that fleeing home made him the writer he is.