Christopher Buckley’s new book Losing Mum and Pup, the intimate and tragic story of the year in which both his parents died, is not even out yet and media outlets are abuzz with talk of the book. Both the Washington Post and New York Times have published excerpts for Sunday’s paper, with the New York Times giving the book lots of ink. The buzz in the media has translated into real life gossip among certain East Coast populations. The Post reported:

The book is not even out and already, Christopher Buckley says, he is hearing about certain Manhattan society ladies sniffing that he should “never darken their dinner table again.”

He sums up his painfully intimate portrait in “Losing Mum and Pup” this way: “He was impossible. She was impossible. And sometimes their impossibilities acted like great magnetic force fields.” Which is to say, William F. Buckley and Patricia Buckley had a stormy marriage and an equally volatile relationship with their only child.

The Washington novelist goes beyond a mere warts-and-all rendering of his father, who died 14 months ago, and his mother, who passed away a year before that. He includes such cringe-inducing revelations as how Pup would relieve himself through the opened door of a moving car, or how, while hooked up to an oxygen machine, the ailing icon summoned him at 2:30 a.m. to plan an immediate lunch for “very important players in the conservative community”—including some who happened to be dead. Why yank back the curtain that far?

“They were extraordinary people,” Buckley says. “Why anyone should expect extraordinary people to have perfect lives would be beyond me.”

And New York Magazine chimed in:

“No matter how many times Chris Buckley says that his upcoming memoir, Remembering Mum and Pup, isn’t going to be a tell-all that paints his late parents, William F. and Pat Buckley, in a harsh light, we still don’t quite believe him.”

The author of 14 books including Supreme Courtship, Boomsday and Thank You For Smoking, Christopher Buckley will join Tina Brown of The Daily Beast in conversation at the 92nd Street Y on May 7.

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