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
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