The Three of Us: A Family Story | Julia Blackburn

The Three of Us: A Family Story | Julia Blackburn | Is this woman my twin?

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The Three of Us: A...

	The Three of Us: A Family Story Julia Blackburn Pantheon, 2008 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 7 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

This is the story of three people: 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.

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Reader Makes Four

This book was mentioned in a Harper's review about memoirs in general, and given high marks for its unusual format and content I bought it to study the writing technique and couldn't put it down. The present and past are deftly woven into a thickly textured family drama that drew me in from the very first page. The diary entries are emphatically apropos, and along with the family pictures create a sense of intimacy with the characters and scenario that feels almost like being part of the family. The story was rough, but the telling of it rang true and lent a certain stability to the challenging terrain. I highly recommend this book.

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Is this woman my twin?

I loved this book and all it's honesty. I've heard it said that we read to know that we are not alone. I do believe this may be true. This book stunned me so because I had a mother who was jealous and envious of me and I felt so alone, and yet she did love me too. Just as in this woman's experience, I only got the mother who adored and truly showed her love for me when she became ill and I tended to her in the last year or so of her life. This woman's account of her relationship with both her parents is relayed so honestly that I must praise her writing as well as her sharing her life with the rest of us.

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For those who come from dysfunction...

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.

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Dysfunctional Three

This book reminded me of "Running With Scissors" in some ways. The narrator is the daughter of an artisitic ,sex- obbessed mother and an abusive English teacher, poet father in the UK. I found it surprising that the author was able to grow up into a functining adult. It's a darkly, disturbing story.

reviews: page 1, 2

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