In the Blood: On Mothers, Daughters and Addiction

(Hardback)

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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 its 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.

Author Bio

Julia Hamilton was born in 1956 in Dumfries in Scotland. Her father was a hill farmer in Kirkcudbrightshire and she went to school there until she was twelve, adopting a Scots accent during the day so that she wouldnt stand out amongst her contemporaries. With her elder brother away at boarding school, she was a solitary child who roamed about in the landscape on her own and read a great deal. In some ways it was a lonely upbringing, but in other ways a good preparation for the life of a writer; Julia finds that she returns over and over again in her novels to the landscape she first knew. At the age of twelve, she was sent away south to Benenden School in Kent, where Princess Anne had been, forcing her to adapt to a quite different set of circumstances in an all-girl environment where hardly anyone appeared to even have heard of Kirkcudbrightshire. In her last novel, Other Peoples Rules, Benenden appears under the guise of Wickenden Abbey and caused a flurry of letters from readers wondering whether she was describing Cheltenham Ladies College or Roedean, a mark of success! Julia did not shine at Benenden and, having hoped to go to Oxford, found herself playing the role of performing monkey as a debutante; it was during her year at Queen Charlottes Ball (then held in the Grosvenor House Hotel) that a man streaked naked round the ballroom, causing a good deal of consternation amongst the assembled parents. The girls of course loved it! Julia married young and had had her two daughters by the age of 26. She had always intended to become a writer, a claim people dismissed, and published her first novel The Idle Hill of Summer when she was 29. The novel was based on a member of her family who had been killed in the Great War and received excellent reviews. After her divorce in her early thirties from the father of her children, Julia then had several novels published by Penguin before finally moving to Harper Collins who will publish her new book Forbiddem Fruits in June of this year. Set in Edinburghs New Town, the novel revolves around the powerful Macarthur Clan whose code of silence is about to be broken, engulfing them in scandal and recrimination. As well as writing and reviewing fiction, Julia has written short stories and will be contributing to the forthcoming anthology Scottish Girls About Town to be published next year. Now married to Trevor Mostyn, an author and journalist who specializes in the Middle East, she lives in Londons Notting Hill.