Overview

'I’ve never read a book like it. It’s as if they tore their own hearts out and asked the other to hold it for them while they wrote.' Phoebe Waller-Bridge ‘Alcohol flows across families like water over a landscape. Sometimes it moves in torrents, sometimes in floods, sometimes in trickles. It always shapes the ground it covers in unmistakable ways.' In the Blood is a memoir in two voices, those of a mother and daughter both in the grip of the disease that has ravaged generations of women in their family. Julia, aged sixty-five, and Arabella, thirty-eight, ended up in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous just nine months apart. In some ways it’s a predictable story; two addicts drank and destroyed and ransacked until they could drink no more. In others, it is entirely unlike any account of motherhood or addiction that has ever been told. This is not a recovery memoir, but rather an unflinching family drama spanning generations, whilst looking pain and shame directly in the eye. Confronting the difficulty of writing faithfully about those we love and the ways in which memory blurs the boundaries of fact, this is the story of women who grew up in shadows, and have navigated their way out of darkness. Brutally honest, darkly funny and bursting with hope, In The Blood is the sound of the howling cry of illness and betrayal across generations, and what you do with that sound when you hear it.

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9780008648435

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Reviews

'This phenomenal book blows the doors off the reality of a savage illness that is still, somehow, not taken seriously enough. Two extraordinary writers; mother and daughter, have faced each other with the most frightening thing of all – the truth. The result is a roar of a book, bursting with vivid stories, incredible insights, hard truths and fierce, fierce love. Whether you have the disease yourself or not, this book will change the way you see the world, your mother and yourself.' Phoebe Waller-Bridge 'This mesmerising do-si-do between mother and daughter will resonate with so many women, drinkers or no. The emotionally astute way in which Julia and Arabella unpick the dense spiral of their lives and their family history to find the root causes of their addiction makes for lots of 'ah-ha' moments, and anyone who has ever fancied a drink will find startlingly apt descriptions, and cause to reflect on their own impulses and dissimulations. This double memoir is a cut above.' Zoe Strimpel 'In The Blood is an essential contribution to our understanding of addiction in all its forms. Unique in its dual perspective, it takes the reader into the heart of experience of how alcoholism and the code of silence has wreaked havoc throughout a family. An extraordinary memoir that is bold and searingly honest.' Lily Dunn, author of Sins of My Father 'Beautifully written and fiercely moving … Equal parts wise, heartbreaking and captivating, this is a remarkable and rare book.’ Alex Larman 'Bold and honest, this book puts children of alcoholics on the map.' Calum Best, Patron of the charity NACOA

Author Information

Julia Hamilton was born in 1956 in Dumfries in Scotland. Her father was a hill farmer in Kirkcudbrightshire and she went to school there until she was twelve, adopting a Scots accent during the day so that she wouldn’t stand out amongst her contemporaries. With her elder brother away at boarding school, she was a solitary child who roamed about in the landscape on her own and read a great deal. In some ways it was a lonely upbringing, but in other ways a good preparation for the life of a writer; Julia finds that she returns over and over again in her novels to the landscape she first knew. At the age of twelve, she was sent away south to Benenden School in Kent, where Princess Anne had been, forcing her to adapt to a quite different set of circumstances in an all-girl environment where hardly anyone appeared to even have heard of Kirkcudbrightshire. In her last novel, ‘Other People’s Rules’, Benenden appears under the guise of ‘Wickenden Abbey’ and caused a flurry of letters from readers wondering whether she was describing Cheltenham Ladies’ College or Roedean, a mark of success! Julia did not shine at Benenden and, having hoped to go to Oxford, found herself playing the role of performing monkey as a debutante; it was during her year at Queen Charlotte’s Ball (then held in the Grosvenor House Hotel) that a man streaked naked round the ballroom, causing a good deal of consternation amongst the assembled parents. The girls of course loved it! Julia married young and had had her two daughters by the age of 26. She had always intended to become a writer, a claim people dismissed, and published her first novel ‘The Idle Hill of Summer’ when she was 29. The novel was based on a member of her family who had been killed in the Great War and received excellent reviews. After her divorce in her early thirties from the father of her children, Julia then had several novels published by Penguin before finally moving to Harper Collins who will publish her new book ‘Forbiddem Fruits’ in June of this year. Set in Edinburgh’s New Town, the novel revolves around the powerful Macarthur Clan whose code of silence is about to be broken, engulfing them in scandal and recrimination. As well as writing and reviewing fiction, Julia has written short stories and will be contributing to the forthcoming anthology ‘Scottish Girls About Town’ to be published next year. Now married to Trevor Mostyn, an author and journalist who specializes in the Middle East, she lives in London’s Notting Hill.

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