Simply brilliant! ( )

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 ( )

I've read more than my fair share of midlife memoirs written by authors with troubled childhoods: they're a guilty pleasure of mine. Most of them should be subtitled "Here's Why Not Everyone Should Raise Kids." Having said that, I don't know if I've ever read any account of parental behavior that was so literally beastial as what's described in Julia Blackburn's "The Three of Us." To say that they didn't have much regard for social niceties doesn't just understate the case, it misses the tenor of their behavior by a couple of miles. At one point, Blackburn's father gets so high on barbiturates that he barks at his family from under a table. Her mother's sexual advances are so blatant that she makes animals that actually have mating dances seem subtle by comparison. In other scenes she comes off as pathologically self-centered and unfeeling. The fact that all of this plays out against the backdrop of gray, more-or-less respectable middle class life in the the grey nineteen fifties makes this story seem even more bizarre. I hope, for your sake, you've never had dinner party guests that were anything like the Blackburns.

What's also odd about this one is how straightforward it is: Julia Blackburn's written more than her share of books, but her narrative style is curiously blank. Curiously, but maybe not surprisingly. Faced with a domestic situation that would drive most kids insane, she seems to have become rather emotionally vacant. While she often comes off as observant and has a genuine fondness for animals, ranging from insects on up, we hear a psychoanalyst describe her, at nineteen, as not having formed a personality. It's not all that hard to believe. Throughout the book, she seems curiously aimless and receptive of her parents' misbehavior, of drugs, of sex, and of life in general. It was, perhaps a coping mechanism, and certainly preferable to active self-harm. But it doesn't always make for compelling reading. as always, it's wonderful to see that she made it through, and that she can construct any narrative at all of her wildly unstable childhood and teen years.

Blackburn brings more in the way of documentary evidence to her narrative than do most midlife memoirists: she draws on years of diaries and letters and includes numerous photographs of herself and her parents. This first-hand documentary material adds a lot to the story, as well providing some temporal structure to what might have been a rather confusing account. The author mentions that she's unable to recall certain meetings or dramas that are nonetheless described in these documents. But she also includes an account of her mother's mercifully peaceful last month, during which they reached a reconciliation of sorts, and faxes she sent during this period to a once and future romantic partner who also appears in the story. These faxes -- which already seem dated by the passage of time! -- contain the book's most artful writing, but these aren't necessarily the most interesting parts of "The Three of Us", though they do, I suppose wrap up the author's own account nicely and prove that she's grown into an admirably stable adulthood. Maybe I should just admit that I, like most readers, don't pick these sorts of books up to hear about the good times.

"The Three of Us" is a solid, and, at times, admirably brave account, but it also seems emotionally detached. Recommended to fans of the genre and, as a sort of public service message, to people unsure about whether they should have kids. If you've ever gotten so out of your head that you've imitated the family pet while on all fours, the answer is probably, "no." ( )

De titel verraadt al meteen dat Julia Blackburn met dit boek niet zomaar een autobiografie schreef als veeleer een drievoudige biografie met naast haar zelf, haar vader-dichter Thomas Blackburn en haar moeder-schilder Rosalie de Meric in de hoofdrollen. Met z'n drieën vormden ze een vrij chaotisch, complex en dysfunctioneel gezin. Het was meer een gezin om te overleven dan eentje dat je leert hoe te leven. Op een of andere manier vond Julia toch een eigen middenweg tussen haar verslaafde vader en promiscue moeder. Zij beschrijft die weg op een wat afstandelijke manier, zonder de wrok, weerzin of woede die je als lezer soms wel zou kunnen voelen bij alles wat Julia als kind heeft moeten doorstaan. Doorheen het boek (en daarmee ook doorheen Julia's leven) loopt steeds het spanningsveld tussen levensdrift en doodsdrift. Julia Blackburn hanteert daartoe zowel haar eigen herinneringen, familiefoto's en dagboekfragmenten als ook brieven van vader of moeder. Tussendoor passeren ook enkele beroemdheden als Francis Bacon of Elias Canetti de revue. Vele hoofdstukken worden afgerond met een fax die ze stuurde aan haar vroegere liefde Herman, waar ze na de dood van haar moeder ook mee herenigd wordt. En zo krijgt haar relaas toch ook weer iets hoopvols mee. ( )

A quite remarkable memoir. Julia Blackburn is too be congratulated in making the horror story of her childhood into such a lively, affectionate and even funny memoir with such a lack of self pity. Brought up by bohemian, dysfunctional parents, an extreme alcoholic and wild father and a mother who could have been the template for Edwina Monsoon. Perhaps not surprisingly Blackburn as soon as she is old enough rebels in the only way she can, by stealing her mothers boyfriend.

A quite remarkable story and like everything else Blackburn has written, beautifully told. Highly recommended ( )