In the Blood: On Mothers, Daughters and Addiction
‘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.
'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 -