"The Three of Us"

We see Julia's life start to fall apart when she is seventeen and more of her parents character traits begin to manifest themselves in her. From her mother it seems that she has inherited a terrible taste in men and an unexplainable need for their attention and devotion. She describes her relations with a man named Enrique saying "It was true that he and I had only spent five weeks together, but I felt that he held my life in his hands and I wanted to explain this fact to him, without being demanding or admitting how much he had hurt me" (182). Like her mother, even after he rejects her, she still cannot let go and move on. She lingers to the ideas of what they had and what they could have had if only... She makes a short, teenage relationship into a bigger event, giving herself to someone who was not doing the same for her. It is a very sad example of how, no matter how much she observed what her mother had done wrong, she nevertheless followed in her footsteps.

Possibly even worse than the characteristics she got from her mom, were the habits and feelings that she got similar to her father. Despite seeing the effects of the drugs on her father both physically and mentally she gets involved in marijuana saying "Theo smoked a huge amount of dope and I began smoking too" (183). I was shocked when I read this because I knew from her telling that she hated seeing her father constantly popping pills. She blamed the pills on many of his emotional problems, and yet she was getting involved in the same thing just with a different type of drug. The fact that she is smoking because the guy, Theo, who she was dating at the time also shows her likeness to her mother in her willingness to do anything to be close to him. A bit ironically she has many of the same feelings as her father when high on the drugs or coming down from a high saying "my heart was racing at different speeds and I was sure I was about to die. I decided that if I didn't die, then I would kill myself in the morning" (183). Just like her father she plunges deep into a suicidal despair. The drugs turning her into the very man whose habits she despised from whom I was sure she would learn to stay away from drugs and alcohol. After all she saw first hand their detrimental effects. I was wrong.

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