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.

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