Julia Blackburn - The three of us: a family story

CONTENTS

About the Book

This is the story of three people: Julia Blackburn, her father Thomas and her mother Rosalie. Thomas was a poet and an alcoholic, who for many years was addicted to barbiturates; Rosalie, a painter, was sociable and flirtatious. After her parents were divorced, Julias mother took in lodgers, always men, on the understanding that each should become her lover. When one of the lodgers started an affair with Julia, Rosalie was devastated; when he later committed suicide the relationship between mother and daughter was shattered irrevocably.

Or so it seemed until the spring of 1999, when Rosalie, diagnosed with leukaemia, came to live with Julia for the last month of her life.

About the Author

Julia Blackburn has written six books of non-fiction, Charles Waterton, The Emperors Last Island, Daisy Bates in the Desert, Old Man Goya, With Billie and My Animals and Other Family, and two novels, The Book of Colour and The Lepers Companions, both of which were shortlisted for the Orange Prize.

Also by Julia Blackburn

FICTION

The Book of Colour

The Lepers Companions

NON-FICTION

Charles Waterton

The Emperors Last Island

Daisy Bates in the Desert

Old Man Goya

With Billie

My Animals and Other Family

The fact that I was unable to put it down is proof of how well she tells it, and of how such an experience, if described with real skill, honesty and sensitivity, will make a valuable book She bases her story mostly on diaries which she kept throughout her troubled youth, which give it a startling immediacy, and then adds another dimension to it by interspersing extracts from letters to Herman, written much later when, astonishingly, she was caring for her dying mother with the utmost gentleness. The rapprochement of daughter and mother at this late stage was an achievement of forgiveness on her part and an attempt at understanding on her mothers, and is deeply moving. By choosing not to use this development as the books climax but to run it like a thread of generosity and kindness through the bitterness of the familys early history, she turns her story from one of horror to one of hope

Diana Athill, Literary Review

Blackburns considerable literary output attests both to her talent for imaginative observation and to her remarkable knack for survival In The Three of Us, Blackburn intertwines the blow-by-blow of her past with dreamy, thoughtful scenes from more recent days she secures the kind of forgiveness that can only come after vengeance has been taken, if only by time

New York Times

An extraordinary memoir gripping, courageous and not easily forgotten

Times Literary Supplement

In a halfway sensible world Julia Blackburn would be a household name, but she has one fatal flaw: a refusal to be categorised in terms of what she writes about, and how she does it. She has written books about Napoleon on St Helena, Goya, the eccentric traveller Charles Waterton and an Australian bag woman, all of which interlace biography, travel and elements of autobiography. Her latest book is more domestic, in terms of both setting and subject matter: like its precursors, it is a small masterpiece, much to be recommended

Jeremy Lewis, Daily Telegraph

Readers be warned this is no misery-lit memoir. Theres something else going on here entirely. Certainly its a tale of disappointed hopes and damaged people inflicting more damage on each other. But its also a work of art in itself: a careful weaving in and out of personal memories and present pain to create something remarkable

Lesley McDowell, Herald

Julia Blackburn, a writer who has already pushed the boundaries of fact and fiction in her eight previous books, once again proves her originality with an electrifying account of a bohemian upbringing and its consequences an exceptionally perceptive and fascinating book and a tribute by a remarkable daughter to the resilience of filial love

Anne Chisholm, Sunday Telegraph

This is a terrible and moving memoir, both raw and artful. The muddle and sadness and fight of it all is refracted through the careful telling, the choice of detail, the remembered voices and the cunning weave of past with present

The Economist

The past twelve months have thrown up a slew of astonishing memoirs, starting with Julia Blackburns The Three of Us. As a novelist, Blackburn has twice been shortlisted for the Orange Prize; as the daughter of the alcoholic poet Thomas Blackburn and his eccentric wife, the painter Rosalie de Meric, she now turns her hand to a rich account of her turbulent relationship with her sex-obsessed mother theres nudity and sex games and also some brilliant vignettes, such as her fathers affair with Francis Bacon not to mention, in 1999 when her mother is finally dying of cancer, a moving reconciliation. Brilliant, but not for a maiden aunt

Camilla Long, Sunday Times Books of the Year

In this memoir she describes her eccentric, dangerous, wonderful bohemian parents her father a poet, her mother a painter and the tangled relationships in which they trapped themselves, and from which in their own ways they freed themselves. Blackburn emerged from this turmoil as a fine writer, and this book is full of understanding and reconciliation. Her mothers attitude to her impending death is admirable and unforgettable and encouraging

Margaret Drabble, New Statesman

The Three of Us, amazingly, ends up being a love story and a story about forgiveness. It may have been a long, painful time coming, but this book was worth the wait

LA Times

Despite the darkness of the rooms she re-enters, her book isnt gloomy in the least Extracts from her journal and faxes to Herman offset the main narrative, which darts back and forth in time. Its a structure that works wonderfully well However unforgiving her detail, tout comprendre, cest tout pardonner is the message of this extraordinary book

Blake Morrison, Guardian

Julia Blackburn has written about Goya, about the island of St Helena, about the naturalist Charles Waterton, about a talking pig; and she has turned her attention to other strange and various things besides, but she has never written a dull sentence. It is clear from the first few lines of this book that The Three of Us is going to be fascinating The story has the terrible inevitability of a Greek myth or fairy tale. Mercifully, there is a happy ending

Cressida Connelly, Spectator

Blackburns first sixteen years sound quite frankly too bad to be true. Nightmarish in fact though she details them in such an ingenuous, matter-of-fact manner that she somehow manages to make terrible events seem almost funny the resulting memoir is mesmerising and brilliant

Val Hennessey, Daily Mail

What sets Blackburns memoir apart from the usual run of hard-luck stories is her extraordinary ability to sit on the edges of her own drama, to notice the texture, cadence and scent of these lives and to capture the experience with a painterly precision

Kate Colquhoun, Sunday Times

A stunning book, part memoir, part portrait of her parents generation, brought into focus by her mothers last days its rawly human, bleakly funny and insightful Blackburn is too smart to offer anything as pat as a happy ending, but she does close this riveting story with an enormous ray of hope