The Books Briefing: How to Tell the Story of a Family

The poet Marianne Moore had a deeply close—perhaps too close—relationship with her mother, Mary. This idiosyncratic bond intrigued Moore’s contemporaries and her biographer Linda Leavell, who trains her eye on it in . As Leavell writes, the poet’s mother could be cruel (she made marriage impossible for her, serving as a confidante and an attentive editor.