dovegreyreader asks... Julia Blackburn

It is my absolute pleasure to welcome Julia Blackburn to the virtual armchair today, talking about her PEN / Ackerley prize winning memoir, The Three of Us.
I first heard Julia speak at Ways With Words some years ago when she talked at one of the most emotional and memorable events I have ever attended, speaking about With Billie, her biography of Billie Holiday. Julia read from her book over a recording of Billie singing and reduced us to tears of genuine compassion in the Great Hall that afternoon. I wrote about The Three of Us last year and was then fortunate enough to spend a week with Julia and Herman and Penelope Lively at the Ways With Words Memoir Writing Course in France last autumn. Much to our amusement, Julia and I kept getting out the the same Red Lamy Safari pens and wearing the same Crocs.
To mark the publication of the paperback edition of The Three of Us Julia has kindly answered our usual questions from her home in Italy and my thanks to her for taking the time to tell us more about the book.

Julia, after I'd read The Three of Us I wrote 'Writing as an adult and using her copious diaries as reference Julia has captured and bottled that childlike understanding of her situation, it must have been tempting to invest it with the wisdom and hindsight of an adult but she doesn't.'
Can you tell us why you decided to write this book now and how difficult was it to recapture your child self? Was this an exhausting revisit or an exhilarating release, a form of therapy? Anything you can tell us about the process at all would be of great interest

 

I think I realized I might be able to  do it when I was writing my biography of Billie Holiday. I did on opening chapter for that, in which I described a party at my mother's house when I first heard a Billie record. I was fourteen and the party was very wild with two prostitutes who did a strip and a rather competitive gay guy who wanted to show he could also do a strip, like a woman. I wrote the chapter as a way of saying that even though I was not American, or black, or a jazz buff, I did know something about the sort of  abandoned childhood that Billie experienced and so she and I had that in common.

To my surprise I found the chapter very easy to write and it became very funny as well.

 

I then did five short stories for Radio 4, called My Animals and Other Family and again I found that I could write about  my childhood in a way that remained quite light hearted, even though some of the suject matter was anything but. The stories were then published as a little book and my husband Herman, did the illustrations.

 

So, that was a beginning.

 

To tell the story and especially the story of the tangled  relationship with my mother, I  approached  the main characters   as if they were strangers to me and I wanted to try to understand them.

As source material I had the  diaries I kept from when I was 14 til 20...I realize now that I wrote  them as a way of breathing through a straw, keeping alive through difficult times. Maybe just the fact of writing things down made them less dangerous.

I also had my mothers diaries in which she recorded every dentist appointment and supper party, alongside the little stars for every time she had made love...even the occasional 3 Star 3 exclamation marks entries from  her early years.

I had my letters to her and hers to me which she had kept even when I had thrown them away in dismay and despair

And I had  my father's many notebooks and letters

 

In the manner of a biographer I began  to work out what was going on and when and how . As the book progressed I could  see the trajectory of my early life and my parents' lives in a way I had never seen it , with much more empathy for all three of us than I had known before.

 

But I don't think I could ever have written the book without  Herman. He and I ( for those who haven't read it) were together when I was 18 and then we were apart for some 35 years before we met up and married, ten years ago. He, more than anyone,  knew the story of me and my mother and while I was writing he was able to keep me steady while I tried to steer through all the sex, drugs and confusion of that time.

 I never saw the  book as an act of therapy, but it was a way of  letting go of the past and since writing it I  feel I have much less excess baggage to carry along. Some people have found it shocking  and several have been angry  with my parents, but I never meant it that way. It seems to me that we all got through in our own way, and that is what matters.  

My mother had a lot of qualities, including the extraordinarily steadfast and humorous manner in which she confronted mortality when it presented itself  to her as well as  her willingness to let go of the old battle between us, just in time. I thank her for that with all my heart.

We're very inquisitive here at dovegreyreader so we love to know about your writing day, it really helps us imagine the writer at work so special space, perfect view, cupboards cleared out before you can settle down, fountain pen or PC, we've had woolly socks and writing jumpers can you tell us?

 

 We live in northern  Italy, up in the mountains but with a distant view of the sea.  We have dormice in the roof and for the month of June and the first bit of July, we have fireflies falling hopelessly in our hair or in a glass of wine. We have a shaggy yellow hunting dog who was given to us because she is afraid of bangs and I have two water tanks which are used by frogs and water snakes. 

 After breakfast I start the day with wandering about, talking to the dog ,staring at insects and tadpoles  and the mountains. Then I go to my workroom which has a window looking out along a  quiet terrace and I start writing. Usually I read aloud whatever I wrote the day before, to listen to it, to hear if the words hang together.

Then I begin . Most days I work for about five hours...more if I am finishing something, less if I am getting stuck.

I use a laptop which still terrifies me for the possibility of the wrong command causing whole chunks of text to disappear, and I print out recent pages and correct them with an old fountain pen.

When I get really stuck I return to the round of staring at  small details of life and that helps. But I enjoy writing tremendously, even the difficult bits.

If you could just imagine for a minute that none of us read books, who must we read and why?

 

A  shifting, changing list.

Recently I have been reading a lot of Beppe Fenoglio. Some of his books, including the wonderful A Private Affair, have been translated. He was a Partisan in Italy during the war and that experience informs much of his writing, but it is his humanity in the face of human muddle that I like so much.

I've just finished a most unlikely book for me,  Minnie's Room by Molly Panter -Downes in which nondescript people in England in the 1940s and 50s do nondescript things and yet the result is deeply moving and much emotionally  wider than you would  think possible.

Another recent read is Direct Red, A Surgeon's Story by Gabriel Weston. It is comprised of  stories, meditations, observations by an Ear Nose and Throat surgeon , who tells you about what she has seen inside our bodies as  well as what was going on on the surface as it were.

 

So, Lynne, and all at Dovegreyreaders, I have said my bit.

Best wishes

Julia Blackburn