In the Blood: On Mothers, Daughters and Addiction: On Mothers, Daughters and Addiction

by Arabella Byrne

'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.

Genres: Nonfiction

Audible Audio

Published November 7, 2024

Reviews

[Bente · Rating 4 out of 5]

Voornamelijk gekocht door de review van Phoebe Waller-Bridge die op de voorkant stond en natuurlijk een interessante insight. Alcoholisme is een ziekte niet een gebrek aan wilskracht, maar je moet wel willen helen! Het laat ook zien dat alcohol vaak komt uit een gevoel van onzekerheid, het gevoel dat je nergens echt thuis hoort. Ik had liever iets meer in de huid willen kruipen van de dames. Ze vertelde vond ik de verhalen niet echt diep in detail, ik miste een beetje "the nitty-gritty".

Mooie qoutes:
"One if the huge perils of drink, dare I say it, for writers in particular, is the way that it's glorified by its creative sufferers: it's injuries are seen as a badge of honour, as darkly glamorous, as the exploits of 'real men, or amusing, mad woman. Lunacy is normalised. Just read Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Dorothy Parker if you don't believe me. It's an illness that comes complete with its own awful pantheon of broken, tormented gods and goddesses."

"I drove past an ad at a bus stop only yesterday featuring a member of Gen Z holding a frosted bottle of Peroni as if it was the holy grail, with the caption "The Taste That Takes You There". But where is 'there'? For civilians that's just fine - go there and have fun - but for alcoholics, it is that remembered sweet spot they can never quite recapture, however hard they try. And, boy, do they try!"

'Active alcoholics spend a lot of time trying to do the right thing and failing for obvious reasons: hungover, self-absobed, self-pitying."

[Antonia A · Rating 1 out of 5]

Alcoholism is a bitter pill to swallow and incredibly hard to write about- so there is bravery here and I had hoped for a well written book on that subject depicting the aching loneliness of addiction and the bravery of recovery.
However author Julia Hamilton describes herself becoming a thief as a young child stealing from her parents, that trait has never left- she continually steals other people’s personal narratives for her own financial gain- without any consultation from any family-she has written like this for 30 years, pulling her own daughter in to repeat history. Arabella is a far superior writer but in this book she cannot escape a-rambling story of her mother who does not care who she hurts with her words.

[Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written with the choice of words and language from both writers so precise and masterly that it was a deeply pleasurable read, despite the pain in the subject matter. Perecquien in the overlap of memories between mother and daughter. I devoured this memoir it in one day.

[Charlotte · Rating 5 out of 5]

lovely . fascinating . beautifully written

[Vicki Swift · Rating 4 out of 5]

I watched an interesting interview with Julia and Arabella in which they state that society's view of alcoholics is dangerously outdated - the disheveled drunk swigging from a bottle of wine in a paper bag - and I must admit that before reading this book and watching that interview, the picture of an alcoholic I had in my mind was along those lines. When I heard the authors speaking I thought gosh they sound so posh and look so smart and... normal. But that's the point, and this book is vital in changing those damaging misconceptions.

I found it really interesting to read about the roots of their addiction; the tracing of it back through the family and the detailed analysis of their upbringings was honest and brave, and it really helped me to understand where an addiction to alcohol can come from. Hearing from both the mother and daughter perspective was compelling, as they described the same events from two different points of view.

I wasn't entirely convinced about the structure of the book - it seemed to jump around a bit and wasn't as coherent as I would like. I also felt that some detail was omitted with a 'I could tell you what I got up to...' or a brief mention of a flatmate being 'fed up of my histrionics' - I wanted all the gritty detail to really hammer home what the day-to-day was like.

I'm so glad I read this though, especially as a woman with a daughter. And I'm so glad Julia and Arabella made it out the other side of their addiction and were courageous enough to share their story to help others.

[Debs Carey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't say I liked this book - no tale of alcoholism is likeable - but it resonated in surprising ways. My grandmother was an alcoholic for as long as I can remember, my grandfather and my mother pandering to her in their own individual ways.

But alcohol played a significant part in the lives of each of my family members, for we lived overseas where alcohol flowed like water. I don't know many people had grandparents (on both sides of the family) who had a room in their homes designated as a bar.

But what resonated in a most surprising way was the theme of feeling you have no home, of being an outsider, of a lack of belongingness (as defined by Maslow), of fear, of being addicted to many things - books, romance, food. All these things are familiar to me, and yet I was fortunate to escape alcohol addiction for, despite having used alcohol to give me courage at multiple points in my life, for some reason it never got its claws in to me - for which I am grateful.

[Kelly Hillman]

I no longer give memoirs ratings but this book was interesting. I have to admit I did skim read parts of it, especially in part one of the book. It picked up and I have to give both authors respect for writing so brutally honestly about their journeys as alcoholics. It would be hard to be so honest when writing about family members, especially when you are co-writing a book that is so heavy with emotions!