How alcohol poisoned one middle-class family

Julia Hamilton and Arabella Byrne both developed alcoholism
Julia Hamilton and Arabella Byrne both developed alcoholism - HQ

Not long after she got sober, in her early fifties, the novelist Julia Hamilton learned that drink had killed her grandfather. Her mother “had used substances to numb uncomfortable feelings… the evening whisky changed her mood for the better.” Julia’s husband, too, had been an alcoholic. And so was she. “Suddenly, it all begins to make sense,” she writes. “My grandfather had this illness and died of it. It killed him and it has done its level best to kill me. Now my daughter has it, too.”

In the Blood tells of how alcohol wound its tentacular grip around and into and through a family. It’s written by Hamilton and her daughter, the journalist Arabella Byrne: two individual stories, told in alternate chapters, of how alcohol gripped each of them, and how they eventually broke free of it, ending up in Alcoholics Anonymous just nine months apart. But it’s also a single memoir, for their stories overlap to build a cohesive story.

In many ways, the tale is predictable, even familiar to many of us. Two addicts drink, destroying themselves and their relationships, leaving a trail of wreckage; the addicts eventually get sober; part of the healing process is that they tell their story. But that makes it all sound depressing and mawkish, and In the Blood is not. It does detail some miserable episodes: the time, for example, when Hamilton nearly took her own life, poised with a kitchen knife over the kitchen sink, stopped only by the entrance of her daughter; the occasion when Byrne ended up in the Mental Health Crisis Unit at Charing Cross Hospital, hanging by a thread, having just been sacked from her job. But it’s no misery memoir: rather, it’s a cool, blunt retelling of events, written in prose that’s eloquent, starkly self-scrutinising, and at times even funny.

I knew Byrne’s writing better, being a fan of her pieces in magazines such as The Spectator. Witty and prescient, they’ve covered topics from why Mummy smokes (secretly, outside behind the bins) to the enduring appeal of Snoop Dogg. She brings the same observational skill to this book. She’s never self-pitying, and always willing to portray herself for exactly what a mess she was. She’s wearing “grubby tracksuit bottoms… covered in bruises”, arriving late for work; she’s drinking, drunk or hungover – always one of the three. Somehow, miraculously, she managed throughout it all to get a master’s degree at Oxford and ultimately, a PhD.

Arabella Byrne has written for The Spectator and this paper
Arabella Byrne has written for The Spectator and this paper - John Lawrence

Part of the reason I didn’t skip a page, and never became exasperated with Hamilton or Byrne, is because they’re upper-class women, meaning this is aristocratic alcoholism – no less destructive or desolate than the commoner kind, but, hedged around with the trappings of respectable society, powerfully compelling to read about. The inside cover has a photograph of them both: Hamilton has the wry, cynical look of an Angela Lansbury-type figure; Byrne has a direct, sultry gaze and cheekbones on which you could cut yourself. I kept stopping to look one or other up on The Peerage; to work out who, exactly, that minor aristocrat husband was, or where that family pile in Scotland had been.

The veneer of respectability clearly protected both women, to some extent, although it clearly also contributed to the omertà that exists around the mere suggestion that someone might have a problem with the booze. As they write in their prologue, this code

operates in mysterious ways in British culture. Die of alcoholism and every medical detail except the condition of alcohol dependence is listed on the death certificate. Suffer from alcoholism and both victim and bystander will go to any lengths to cover up the cause of anguish. Recover from alcoholism and you must keep it a secret lest you are ostracised and ridiculed by the drinking majority. Speak about alcoholism as the child of alcoholic parents and you are accused of washing your family’s dirty laundry in public, of betraying your own flesh and blood, no matter how shot through that blood is with alcohol.

Is that quite the same across all strata of the British class system? Possibly not. Nevertheless, the underlying vibe of stiff upper lip means that, thank goodness, the book avoids – just about – a descent into that ghastly “self-healing journey” sort of nonsense. There’s not a “#blessed” to be seen; comfort comes through a dog licking tears off a face.

The salvation of Alcoholics Anonymous arrives, in Hamilton’s telling, via a cousin who comes to lunch, and “told me a bit about AA, enough to make me want to know more”. And yet, Byrne says, “the decision to turn the secret of [Hamilton’s] alcoholism into a story of transformation and recovery was not met with unanimous approval… Her friends, in an attempt to correct what they saw as the most desperate slur against her name, wasted no time in telling her she was talking absolute rubbish.” The fact both women ended up there together also became a source of tension. “Recently a newfound scepticism has crept into my practice, and I find myself unwilling to go to meetings,” writes Byrne. “Is this because my mother is there in every single meeting, telling ‘her story’, too? Or is it because the boundary lines between her story and mine have become contested, their demarcation unclear like Yugoslavia after the First World War? I rather think the latter. Either way, I feel tired and would prefer to be in my room smoking cigarettes, alone.”

Yes, In the Blood is about alcohol; but it’s also about mothers and daughters, how they interact, how they tell the same story, in different words. “How do you even write a memoir with your mother?” Byrne writes. “This book is an attempt, however flawed, to answer these questions. It’s not a manual to stop you or your child from drinking and neither is it a guide to living as the child of an alcoholic.” It is, however, as they hope, “raw and truthful and ultimately hopeful”. It will make you think about your own relationships and family history, even if alcohol plays no part in them. It has stayed in my mind since the moment I put it down.


In the Blood by Julia Hamilton & Arabella Byrne is published by HQ at £16.99. To order your copy, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books