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The Three of Us

Two were barking

Julia Blackburn
Cape, 313pp, £16.99,

Cressida Connolly

Wednesday, 14th May 2008

Cressida Connolly on Julia Blackburn's family memoir

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. Dark, too. This is a family memoir, from Blackburn’s early childhood with both her parents, progressing through their divorce to a series of ever more difficult triangles featuring herself, her mother and a series of male lodgers.

There was nothing conventional about Blackburn’s parents. Her father, the poet Thomas Blackburn, was: ‘an alcoholic who for many years was addicted to a powerful barbiturate. . . the cumulative effect of the drug combined with the alcohol made him increasingly violent and so mad he began to growl and bark like a dog’. Blackburn is very matter-of-fact about her father: ‘He was disastrous in many ways, yet I never felt threatened by him.’ He evidently loved his daughter, in a distracted sort of way: they got on. Not so with her mother, a painter called Rosalie de Meric who sounds like one of those cruel yet pleading characters played so well by Joan Crawford or Bette Davis. ‘I was always afraid of her’, writes her daughter.

Rosalie was a nightmare. Self-centred to the point of lunacy, she nevertheless lacked any insight. Sex-crazed, self-deluding, desperate, she seems to have lacked not only any maternal feeling, but also any trace of kindness, empathy or compassion.

Some readers may feel that Blackburn is unduly harsh on Rosalie (is it necessary to tell us, for instance, that she farted in the bath?). The account certainly denies her any dignity, save that of dying bravely. Blackburn’s exploration of Rosalie’s own childhood — as an unloved, unwanted younger sister — sheds some light on her subsequent character, but it is almost impossible to feel any sympathy for such a woman.

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