Recollections of crimes, misdemeanours and shameful stories can pall, especially when viewed through the bleary-eyed lens of alcohol. But In the Blood, a memoir of devastating clarity – the result of an unprecedented collaboration between a mother and daughter whose alcoholic gene was ‘baked into them like a curse’ – provides a frightening insight into the labyrinthine workings of the addict’s devious mind.
The illness had run riotously through many generations until Julia Hamilton and Arabella Byrne both rejected what had ‘zig-zagged through [their] family like a knight in chess’. As though positioned on alternate sides of a mirror, Julia, now in her sixties, and Arabella, in her forties, debate the premise that ‘alcoholics breed alcoholics’ and reflect back to one another the similar perspectives of their suffocating, chaotic experiences.
The story of abandonment that sloshes through the book starts with the mysterious disappearance of Julia’s great-great-grandfather, who left his wife and children and vanished forever in pursuit of the source of the Niger. But it is in the unhappy female line that the pattern of self-medication and neglect becomes embedded – a special stigma inevitably attaching to an inebriated mother. Having married, on the rebound, a penniless Scottish aristocrat, Julia’s mother cannot forget her first youthful romance. She remains ever resentful, too, of her distant mother; divorces her husband; and treats her daughter as carelessly as Julia will in turn treat Arabella.
As a teenager, Julia had already discovered that drink was ‘quite clearly good, a game-changer’ that enabled her to escape her tricky, combative mother. By the age of 20 she was married to a similarly addicted husband, and on their first night together in a hotel she was thrilled by the sophistication of her soulmate ringing room service to order champagne.
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