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.
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