"The Three of Us" by Julia Blackburn

For my third quarter blog am reading a memoir by Julia Blackburn called "The Three of Us: A Family Story." On the very first page of the memoir Blackburn essentially sums up the relationship between her and her father saying "He was disastrous in so many ways, yet I never felt threatened by him. I could be frightened of the madness and the drunken rages, but I never doubted the honesty of his relationship with me and that was what really mattered" (1). From this quote one can tell that despite her fathers drug addictions and alcohol abuse, she still saw him as a father figure and cherished her relationship with him. However, I did find it odd that despite watching him go into insane bouts of rage where he lashed out and even became delirious, she still respected him. I continued to lose respect for her father as I learned about his relationship with her mother. She further describes her fathers relationship with her and her mother saying "My father never hit me; except once when the three of us were sitting down to Sunday lunch at the big round table and he lunged sideways at my mother with his fist, but got me by mistake" (6). She acts as though it is all okay because he didn't mean to hit her, but he was still trying to hit her mother, which in my opinion is just as bad! It is strange to me how she makes such an animal act seem not out of place at the family table, leading me to believe this was not the only time he lashed out against her mother.
Not only did she have a very strange relationship with her father, her mother was not exactly what one would call "normal". In the very beginning of he memoir she summarizes her relationship with her mother saying "Right from the start I was her sister and her confidante and eventually, her sexual rival, as the boundaries between us became increasingly dangerous and unclear" (2). From this sentence, and what we learn later on, her mother was not terribly "maternal." She wanted a companion, someone she could talk to, not a daughter-someone she had to raise and take care of. She even goes so far as to say that her mother begins to see her as a sort of rival in attracting the attention of men. Both of these strange insights into the lives of her parents and their location at the very beginning of the book lead us to believe that they played a key role in her development despite their clearly dysfunctional natures.

Blackburn, Julia. The Three of Us: A Family Story. New York: Pantheon Books, 2008.