The Three of Us: A Family Story

by Julia Blackburn

This is the story of three Julia Blackburn; her father, Thomas; and her mother, Rosalie. Thomas was a poet and an alcoholic who for many years was addicted to barbiturates, which would often make him violent. Rosalie, a painter, was sociable and flirtatious; she treated Julia as her sister, her confidante, and eventually as her deadly sexual rival. After Julia’s parents divorced, her mother took in lodgers, always men, on the understanding that each would 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 irrevocable.

Or so it seems until the spring of 1999, when Rosalie, diagnosed with leukemia, came to live with Julia for the last month of her life. At last the spell was broken, and they were able to talk with an ease they had never known before. When she was very near the end, Rosalie said to Julia, “Now you will be able to write about me, won’t you?”

The Three of Us is a memoir like no other you have read. The writing is magical, and the story is extraordinary, not only for its honest but also for its humor and its lack of blame. Ultimately, this is a tale of redemption, a love story. It will surely become one of the classics of that genre.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography, Biography Memoir, True Story, British Literature, Addiction

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Julia Blackburn is the author of several other works of nonfiction, including Charles Waterton and The Emperor’s Last Island, and of two novels, The Book of Color and The Leper’s Companions, both of which were short-listed for the Orange Prize. Her most recent book, Old Man Goya, was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Blackburn lives in England and Italy.

Reviews

[Moira Macfarlane · Rating 4 out of 5]

3½ ster, afgerond naar boven nu, omdat het me zo ontzettend bijblijft.

Een ware tragedie. Het boek gaat er bijna aan ten onder.

'Tot zover niets aan de hand, maar zodra mijn moeder een blik wierp op het kleine schepsel dat naast haar lag, begon zich iets te roeren uit haar eigen getroebleerde verleden. Ze had het gevoel dat ze niet van een nieuw leven was bevallen, maar van zichzelf. Ik was zij en zij was ik... ik als pasgeboren wezentje dat onvoorstelbaar hulpbehoevend is. En toen het tijd was de baby te voeden, werden alle liefdevolle gevoelens en beschermende instincten tenietgedaan door wat ze een golf van ambivalentie noemde en werd ze overweldigd door een gevoel van wrevel om alles wat van haar verlangd werd.'

[Lyn Elliott · Rating 4 out of 5]

The three of them in the Blackburn family were Thomas Blackburn, poet, her alcoholic and occasionally violent father; Rosalie de Meric, painter, her unconfident, jealous, nymphomaniac mother; and Julia, their only daughter, caught in the middle.

As her Wikipedia entry says briskly, her upbringing was Bohemian and troubled. Horrific is the word that occurs to me. In telling the tale of her parents fractured selves, their even more fractured relationship, and her own struggles with her mother, Julia has brought off an extraordinary achievement.

She has managed to achieve a remarkable sense of detachment and her writing is somehow gentle, even when everyone's emotions are running on overdrive. It's not a 'misery memoir' (https://www.theguardian.com/books/200...) but a series of vivid pictures.

Julia always loved her father, and knew that he loved her. His violence was fuelled by alcohol and by his addiction to the prescribed drug, sodium amytal. The only time he hit Julia was by mistake, when he aimed at his wife and missed. He was appalled that he'd hit his daughter.

Both parents were promiscuous, and the mother so sexually obsessed that in my head I think of her as a nymphomaniac, acutely aware of her daughter as a potential, then actual, sexual rival. Julia hated her mother for most of her life, and it was only in the month or so before Rosalie died that they came to terms with each other, finally managing to tell each other that they loved them, and were sorry.

At the end of each chapter of recollection of growing up and of her parents' lives, is a short section in which Julia writes about her last weeks with her mother; some are diary extracts, some are from faxes (letters sent by fax, I presumed) she wrote to her husband. In these musings we can see the bloom of gentleness between the two women, and it's no surprise in the end that they can finally admit their closeness despite all the pain of the past.

It's a formidable book, demanding and sometimes harrowing, but absolutely worth it.

The Guardian review by Blake Morrison is excellent. https://www.theguardian.com/books/200...

[Kathleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book about emotional child abuse. Talk about never having a childhood! Julia intersperses each chapter in this memoir with italicized letters and journal entries about her dying mother. The book also has many fascinating black and white photographs. To me is seems inconceivable that she could possibly have anything to do with her mother after suffering so much emotional abuse, lack of boundaries, and inappropriate behavior during her childhood. With a nymphomaniac mother and a drug addicted father who were an artist and poet, she received all sorts of mixed messages. Of course her parents were who they were, due to their own horrible childhoods. I found it interesting that her mother, but not her father frightened her. Still,the human spirit is inextinguishable and forgiving. Julia is truly amazing. How on earth did she get to be a writer?? I was especially interested in this book, since it was "the three of us" with my parents and me as well.

[Emi Yoshida · Rating 5 out of 5]

I devoured this brutally honest story written by daughter Julia who is all but destroyed by her narcissistic parents Alcoholic Tom and Sex-Addicted Rosalie, because despite her being tainted and abused and miserable, Julia makes it. She doesn't just survive her childhood, she makes peace with it, she makes amends and facilitates her mom making amends too, and not only that but she is fully functional (such a great writer!) and best of all she is reconciled with her one true love. And this is non-fiction!!!

This beautiful book is filled with photos and diary entries, and my only criticism is that the cover art (though beautiful and aptly evocative, should have a more appropriate nose on it).

[Belinda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I heard about this book on "A Good Read". Harriet Gilbert recommended it, the two other people on her panel agreed that it was compelling, and that, despite the dreadful childhood Julia Blackburn had to endure, that it was neither self-absorbed nor unhappy reading. I got it out of the library and was immediately drawn into this memoir.

Julia, as is implied by the title, is one in a family of 3. She is the daughter of Thomas Blackburn, poet, alcoholic, drug addict, and Rosalie de Meric, artist, sex-addict, without appropriate boundaries, and selfish just like her husband. Poor child - she didn't cut a break from day 1.

Both parents had issues and should never had children, but together they were appalling. Rosalie needed love and tried to get it by being available to her husband at the expense, or so it seems, of her own wishes. Thomas seems to have been a monster. His horrific father scarred him and he escaped his own misery by taking huge amounts of barbiturates (often prescribed) and far too much alcohol. It's hard to see which parent ruined the marriage, but it does seem as though Thomas's drinking, affairs, drugs, and violence, made Rosalie into a highly anxious, desperate, insufferable pain. My money is on him as the main culprit for sparking the dysfunction within the family. Rosalie's way of coping with his neglect and cruelty was to offload the fear Thomas engendered onto Julia.

Possible Spoiler Alert here:
So, Julia is used to shield her mother from her father, as a sounding board, dumping ground for her mother as she recounted (to a very young child) her sexual needs, her orgasms, the amount of sex she had, the lovers and what they did to her, etc. When Daddy went nuts and tried to beat Mummy, Julia stepped in. When Mummy tried to pacify Daddy, Julia was somewhere nearby as they had sex. It is really as sick as you can get. It reminded me of Anne Sexton masturbating next to her 9 year old daughter, Linda.

Even after Mummy and Daddy divorce the lovers take precedence over the mother/daughter relationship. It's a complete wonder that Julia was never physically abused by these horrible men, although she was certainly groomed by them on a mental and emotional level. Mummy, on the other hand, never protected her, often left her home alone (this is a girl under the age of 13) and accused her of trying to take her men from her.

Finally Julia grows up and leaves home (with a smoking habit thanks to Mummy allowing it) and then ends up in a messy, awful situation which Mummy blames her for, often publicly. No one ever seems to notice that this poor child is being treated badly by her totally screwed up parents. One friend, a woman who helped look after Julia when her parents went out, blames her for it. I found this lack of compassion unbelievable.

Somehow Julia survives her parents and manages to understand them and herself enough to live a relatively normal life.
It's a bloody miracle.
They don't deserve such a humane daughter.

I thoroughly recommend the book because it's well written - very well written - fascinating, and so balanced. I know Julia had access to her parents writing, so some of the marvellous writing may be able to be attributed to the two of them, but she manages to rise above both parents on a psychological way. She's certainly a better writer than her father (the poetry has dated).
However, this is a difficult book because Julia is so relentlessly abused by her awful parents.
Gird your loins.

[Lit Folio · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a read for those who come from emotional dysfunction. And after reading substantive reviews of this strange memoir, I simply had to give it a read for myself. What's so striking about Blackburn's work here is her downright, unabashed honesty. Dad is a monster, alright, but his crazy drunken antics were somehow more acceptable than her mother's odd, boundary violations of an all too prurient interest in her budding daughter's private sexual coming of age. This is a torture Blackurn takes us through, interspersed with passages on accounts she made some thirty years forward as this very same mother lay dying.

Of course, all this makes for an exceptional memoir. One I can be thankful for in portraying complex parents one still must come to terms with long after both have departed this world.

Powerful reading ranked highly on my list of must-reads. Should be better known (I think of the mega-hit, THE GLASS CASTLE, which is page-turning reading, but not nearly as well written and reflective as Blackburn's.)

Recommend--especially if you've experienced, first-hand, the pain of difficult parents.

[Iva · Rating 4 out of 5]

An only child of a crazy alcoholic poet father and a sex maniac mother, Blackburn, a wonderful writer of books on the most varied topics, appears to have come out whole in spite of a family that could not be invented. Proof is having wonderful family photos sprinkled throughout. For those who can't get enough of dysfunctional memoirs. (They are never-ending and I aim to read them all!)

[Furait]

hoe Julia ondanks/dankzij haar eccentrieke, egocentrische wouldbekunstenaar-ouders die zelf een traumatische jeugd hadden, ogenschijnlijk sereen en zonder haat of andere emotie terugblikt op haar eigen geschiedenis, ...
onnodige lectuur want te individueel en extreem afwijkend van de normale leefwereld, hoog factiongehalte, en onbegrijpelijk dat schrijfster Blackburn het neurotisch en traumatiserend gedrag van haar ouders zelfs postuum wil openbaar maken, dus ondanks haar voorwenden dat ze sereniteit bereikt heeft, is dit een zelftherapeutisch werk dat ze niet had moeten publiceren.

[Sophy H · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bloody hell, I'm actually surprised Julia Blackburn was able to get through her childhood/young adult years intact! I thought my family was fucked up but her parents take the bloody biscuit! Honestly I've never read such nutty, bizarre, cruel, batshit, freaky ass behaviour in all my life. Poor Julia. And then she had the compassion and grace to look after her mum as her mum was dying! I'd have written the narcissistic, mentally deranged woman off a long time before!

Phew! This book is very well written and keeps you gripped throughout. What a life to have experienced.

Crazy days!

[Krisje · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastisch geschreven zware kost !

[R.C. Waller · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. I recommended it, but be ready because it is a wild ride. I just had to keep turning pages, anxious to see what strange thing Julia's parents, especially her mother, might do next.

Julia Blackburn opens the door and lets us see every aspect of her unorthodoxed upbringing at the hands of her father, a poet and her mother, an artist. These two adults never seemed to forego anything for the sake of their daughter, but rather were both self-indulgent, co-dependent and caustic. Her father, addicted to alcohol and pain meds and her mother, addicted to her own ego and sex simply made only "physical" adjustments to her presence in the household. They took their young daughter on every emotional path that corresponded to their own mixed-up existence. They both used her as a buffer and console for their angry ravings at one another. Her mother felt the need to talk to her about her sexual conquests of every boarder that crossed their homes threshold...and their were many.

Nevertheless, Julia manages to write sympathetically about these two people whom she loved. She goes into their backgrounds to shed light on the events that produced such unstable people and she writes about her own path to discovering her true self...warts and all.

[Deja Bertucci · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the best memoirs I've read recently. Pretty deeply depressing, with this gorgeous lacey hope weaved through.

It's written by Thomas Blackburn's (a poet's) daughter, and her home life was insanely rough. Just insane, really. In the book she reconstructs it through letters and journals and detailed memories. Clean, tight, beautiful prose.

She ends each volatile chapter with a short excerpt from a journal or fax exchange from much later, in 1999, when her mother is dying and their relationship, in the face of death, heals and smooths and becomes beautiful. A structural stroke of genius to have those ending passages in each chapter. It's almost like each psychological wound is healed as soon as it arrives on the page.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Memoirs are interesting because a lot of times they read like a novel. This book was well written and makes me want to check out other work by her. That she turned up normal at all with the crazy antics of her parents was pretty amazing. An alcoholic, abusive, depressed dad and her mom, a sex addict that always treated her like competition. A really interesting read. I really enjoyed all the pictures she interspersed throughout the book and how she brought the present in with the past as she ended each chapter with thoughts of taking care of her mother during the last month of her life.

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another memoir about someone growing up with horrible parents. This time it's a violent alcoholic and drug addicted father and a mother who shares waaaay too many details about her sex lifem as well as her men, with her teenage daughter. At first, I was fairly interested in the book, but by the time I finished I was just left with a queasy feeling.

[Debbie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read it quickly but it felt like a toxic read. I felt a lot for Julia Blackburn and it put my own disturbed parents into perspective, but it left me feeling disturbed. How do children survive such parenting in one piece?

[Aberlowitz · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sorry guys- I couldn't read this. Who is she? Who cares?

[Dead John Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

More Englishness and class.

A story of a dysfunctional family, but one with money and no need to work. Pure indulgence on a scale not imaginable in these woke days of instant morality and outrage.

Surprisingly readable and almost incomprehensible as to how Julia Blackburn managed to get through it all.

We must be of similar ages because I could place myself at some of the times of events she records in her life.

While she was going off to Spain to live with her painter lover, I was going to work in all weathers while living in just one of many cultural vacuums that make up most of English working class life.

While she was having a meltdown in her own time and place I was faced with the mundanities of earning a living or being broke.

Doors were shut to me simply because of where I was born and the family I was born into. Inferiority was driven into us by middle class teachers in almost every working class school across the country. By comparison they had privilege and entitlement driven into them by their own kind.

Isn't it like that everywhere?

In a lot of ways England is many countries and cultures layered one over the other.

The novel, The City and The City by China Miéville is the closest I have ever come to finding an accurate description of the phenomena of different cultures occupying the same space.

I come from a completely different country to Julia Blackburn. While her father had 18 years of Freudian therapy, paid for by an aunt, my father barely survived war wounds and an industrial accident, yet still managed to provide for us.

There is no jealousy or bitterness in me around this anymore, there used to be years ago when I was young and incensed about the injustice and the inequality and realising that the only solution was to GTFO as quickly as possible, something I did and still count as the the only possible way I could have survived in this life.

Thank you Julia Blackburn

[Jenny Yates · Rating 4 out of 5]

This honest and thoughtful memoir is about being raised with tempestuous artistic parents. The author’s father is a fairly famous British poet, and her mother a painter.

Her father was also an alcoholic, and prone to violent rages, although they were always directed towards her mother, never towards her. What this meant is that Julia Blackburn had to take on the role of her mother’s protector.

However, her mother was even more challenging. A vibrant and passionate woman, she became more and more jealous of her daughter as she got older. After her parents divorced, her mother took in lodgers, and mostly slept with them, while frequently accusing her daughter of trying to seduce them.

Finally, it happened. Blackburn slept with one of her mother’s boyfriends, and they moved in together. The first triangle of the book is Blackburn and her two parents, literally at each other’s throats. The second triangle consists of Julia Blackburn, her mother, and Geoffrey, the man who was lovers with both of them. It’s a tense situation, and it’s Geoffrey who actually ends up in worst shape.

Blackburn takes pains to recreate the past from letters and journal entries as well as her memory, and she is clear and unsentimental as she describes the way things unfolded. And this narrative is juxtaposed with letters written much later. These letters describe the changes in their relationship at the end of her mother’s life, when she was dying of cancer. So we follow these two story lines simultaneously, and the gentler trajectory of the second story helps the reader cope with the careless cruelty of the earlier years.

[Jodell · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a true story about a little family. Mommy, Daddy, Julia. It was hard to read about how cray cray Julia's mother was. She was mentally ill and incapable of having or taking care of a child. She flaunted her sexuality and her affairs in front of her very young daughter. Pushed her into situations she didn't belong. It was horrifying.

It was a matter of time before Julia grew up into a teenager and befell the attention of one of her mother's lovers. A man who was attracted to young girls. Julia's mom was getting older and well things happened that shouldn't have. The things that happen are so horrifically sad that the rift is too large to salvage the mother daughter relationship.

But Julia's mother's redeeming grace was having grandchildren and falling in love with them and finding a different kind of love besides a sexual type of love.

In the end of Julia's mothers' life, they make peace. I have compassion for her and her mom. Hey, not everyone can be sane.

A few things that bothered me was there was no explanation of who was in each picture in the book. And that it was kind of redundant that I had to read over and over all about Julia's mother's different lovers from the very beginning before Julia was born to the very end. I was more interested in just the mother daughter relationship.

[Jo · Rating 2 out of 5]

My two stars are about the feeling I had reading the book, rather than a comment on how well written it was. It was a really good piece of writing, and an interesting human story. But for some reason I had to push myself through it to the end, pulled away by every distraction, and it left me feeling profoundly depressed. Maybe the dysfunctional family territory was too familiar from my own experience. I think my difficulty was a feeling of incongruence ... between the stories being related and the manner of their telling. A recognition of that kind of telling and the deep trauma lurking inside it. I found it rather stressful, the flat-tone tension of all that unprotested matter of fact. At the same time it was challenging to see these awful parents portrayed not as monsters but as complex human beings deserving of real compassion. But but but ...

[Ruth Brumby · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I look back to times past in my life, I feel I've been quite different people; Julia Blackburn seems to remember more and see a clearer development, which I found odd. It may be partly because she kept notebooks and thought more about selfhood. Her story is fascinating, but I was also puzzled by the way she does not seem to have a distanced perspective on the past from her new position; it's more as if she relives it. This makes some of the parts about the sixties feel strangely dated. In a way she seems to write for herself; I'm not sure what she expected a reader to make of her lack of anger towards her father or of her anger towards her mother. I found it quite distressing in parts. It's also strange to me how she didn't seem to worry about where money would come from.

[RUTH GUTHRIE · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very moving and well-constructed memoir. I have found myself coming back to incidents and vignettes that Julia describes again and again. There was a timelessness about the story even though I'm aware it's happening in the 70's, 80's and 90's, and yet also an immediacy about the experiences. A tantalizing tale

[Frances · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting, but at times troubling read. Blackburn's depiction of her early life with two very damaged parents leads the reader to question how she survived and become able to form lasting and meaningful relationships. Sad in many parts, the book also shows must the redemptive power of love and forgiveness.

[Colleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was a hard one for me. I give credit to the author for sharing her life in this book. It took me awhile to get into the style of her writing but once I did I was glad to better understand her relationship with both her mother and father.

[Gerard de Bruin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prachtig geschreven biografie van een ongewoon en disfunctioneel gezin. Met twee ouders met een zo mogelijk nog 'disfunctionelere' achtegrond.

[Mousy Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

A disturbing read...definitely had all my child protection radar buzzing...but written in an engaging and captivating way and impossible to put down. Shows how much things have changed!

[Eslin Hansma · Rating 1 out of 5]

Boring

[Fonny Pasma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wat een indrukwekkend boek!

[Brogan McCabe-Inman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author led a very traumatic early life with two sad artists for parents who also has troubled youths. Lyrically written.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb.