The Three of Us [Paperback]

A terrific read. There's not a great deal of action in this book. No adventures or surprises but it's about the everyday experiences of a very messed up family. Julia Blackburn's parents are pretty strange and then we meet the grandparents!!! It's all about looking in on someone's life and finding that you want to know all the sordid details and how it all turns out. The author doesn't hold anything back.

I think Julia Blackburn has a very accessible style of writing and I am looking forward to reading more from her.

Please also see my review of "With Billie".

It's not really how I headed it, a misery memoir, for it is in places bitterly hilarious. Thomas Blackburn was a distinguished poet, well worth reading, and his daughter Julia, the author of this present memoir, an accomplished and rather classy novelist. After reading her father's slightly outrageous autobiography 'A Clip of Steel' - named after an anti-excitement-in-the-night device that his father commanded him to wear - I devoured this book. Witty, riveting, with lots of charged and frank sexuality and unrivalled in its scope and poetry.

When you hear about some people's childhoods, you wonder how they've remained sane. Julia Blackburn is a highly intelligent novelist and biographer, in a happy second marriage, with a good relationship with her children. This, considering her own upbringing, is somewhat of a miracle. Blackburn was the child of two bohemian parents, who gathered round the crowd in Soho in the 1950s - her father was, briefly, Francis Bacon's lover (despite being heterosexual). Both Blackburn's father, poet and teacher Thomas Blackburn, and her mother, painter Rosalie de Meric, had had appallingly unhappy childhoods themselves. Although they shared a love of the arts and of mountaineering, the marriage began to have problems very early on, and neither could save the other from their private miseries. Thomas, an alcoholic with an addiction to tranquillizers, was compulsively unfaithful and sometimes violent - Julia Blackburn remembers running away with her mother on a night that her father came home in the mood for a fight, and another time when he chased Rosalie round the table with a carving knife shouting 'you are the angel of death and I must kill you'. Rosalie, though less obviously crazy, was obsessed with sex. She talked about her sexual habits and needs openly with her daughter and, after she and Thomas had separated and when Julia was in her teens and a very beautiful young girl, started letting rooms to male lodgers hoping that they'd be drawn to the house by Julia, and that then she, Rosalie, could seduce them. Inevitably this scheme went horribly wrong when one of Rosalie's lodgers tired of her and turned his attentions to Julia. Rosalie tried to distract Julia with another lodger, a handsome Dutchman, which led to further complications. It was only years later, when Rosalie was dying of leukaemia, that she and Julia became easy with each other again.

Julia Blackburn tells the dramatic and often shocking story of her family life somewhat wryly, without melodrama and without a trace of self-pity. She writes very movingly of how, as a middle-aged woman, she became a good friend of her mother after years of tension. She is also amusing - even if the subject-matter is somewhat frightening at times - about her mother's sexual intrigues and Thomas Blackburn's massive drinking binges and colossal self-absorption (though he clearly loved his daughter very much in his own way). She also writes wisely about her own love affairs and how messy they got - her on-off love affair with Herman, the Dutchman who she left for her mother's ex-lover, got back together with again, left again, and finally met again in middle age, and about her unhappy affair with her mother's ex-lover Geoffrey. There are also some lighter moments to the book - lovely descriptions of landscapes and of animals. The family loved animals and there are some particularly good ones that crop up every now and then in this book. My only criticism is that Blackburn doesn't tell us all that much about her later life. I'd have liked to know more about her time at university (she studied long distance most of the time, commuting to the University of York from a flat in London), about her first marriage and her experiences as a mother, and about how she earned her living before her writing career began (and indeed, how she still does - her books have all had critical acclaim and sold all right but she's not, I think, quite on the bestseller lists yet). I'm wondering if I'll find out more about Blackburn's life in 'Thin Paths', her latest, which I purchased recently.

All in all a very brave, very interesting, sometimes sad and sometimes very funny memoir. Five stars!