In the Blood
'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
‘A terrific read’ Amy Liptrot, author of The Outrun
‘Remarkable…As a stark insight into the disease, In the Blood makes a mark…’ The Sunday Times Culture
‘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.
Julia Hamilton is a novelist. She has published six novels and has written for Harpers & Queen, Vogue, the Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Times, and the Times Literary Supplement. In the Blood is her first work of non-fiction.
Arabella Byrne is a journalist. She has written widely for the Spectator, the Critic, Tatler, and the Daily Mail amongst others. She is an ambassador for NACOA, the National Association for Children of Alcoholics. In the Blood will be her first book.