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Bad Blood: A Memoir

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Overview

Blood trickles down through every generation, steeps into every marriage. Lorna Sage's autobiography is a searing and funny anatomy of three marriages. Her early childhood was dominated by her brilliant, bitter grandfather, a boozer, a womanizer, a vicar exiled to a remote village on the Welsh borders. His wife loathed him, lived on memories and shook her fist at any parishioner bold enough to call at the house. From the vicarage Lorna watched the fading away of the old world and the slow dissolve of her grandparents' disastrous union.

Then father returns from the army, grandfather dies, and she moves with her parents and baby brother into a newly built council house. The open-plan future is a place of rural dereliction. Living with her real parents she quickly learns that the post-war world is full of secrets and myths that mark her family--her mother's thwarted dreams, her father's addiction to work, and mysterious emotional economy of their proper marriage. Longing to leave, Lorna vows she will never marry or have children. But she grows up so fast that she finds herself pregnant without realizing she has lost her virginity.

Editorial Reviews

The late British literary critic Sage spent her youth in the home of her grandparents, in the vicarage of Hanmer, a village in Flintshire, England. Her father was off fighting in World War II, her mother off in her own dreamy rerun of adolescence, so young Lorna hung onto the "skirts" of her vicar grandpa, a histrionic, bitterly intelligent philanderer with the "habit of living irritably in his imagination." His idiosyncrasies were almost endearing: he spent days stalking the graveyard muttering Shakespearean soliloquies and blacking out the spines of the books in his library to deter casual theft. Grandma, "a fat doll tottering on tiny swollen feet," considered Hanmer a "dead-alive dump" and never forgave her husband for talking her into marriage and leaving the gynocentric Eden of her family's shop in South Wales. What made her grandparents' marriage "more than a run-of-the-mill case of domestic estrangement" was Grandma's "refusal to accept her lot" she remained "furious" with her husband and, by extension, with all men, including her daughter's and granddaughter's husbands. In such a dysfunctional household, where "nobody wants to play the part of parent," Sage didn't have the option of passing for normal not that the "functional illiteracy" of her village peers was anything to envy. Ultimately, it was books and sheer orneriness her grandpa's "bad blood" that saved her from the oblivion her mother and grandmother had chosen. Sage finds such delicious ironies in all the awful detail that readers can't help but be entertained., wickedly. (Mar.) Forecast: Sage won the prestigious Whitbread Biography Award (2000) and has received kudos from the likes of Jonathan Raban and Doris Lessing. Her book is perfect book club reading, combining social history and great writing. Expect strong sales. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information. -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Lorna Sage

An influential literary critic, Lorna Sage taught English at British and American universities and was most recently professor of English at the University of East Anglia. Her previous books include Women in the House of Fiction, The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English, and a short monograph on Angela Carter.

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Additional Info

Imprint

HarperCollins

Filesize

786.24 KB

Number of Pages

304

eBook ISBN

9780061188817

Awards

  • New York Times Editors' Choice

Excerpt from: Bad Blood by Lorna Sage

Grandfather's skirts would flap in the wind along the churchyard path and I would hang on. He often found things to do in the vestry, excuses for getting out of the vicarage (kicking the swollen door, cursing) and so long as he took me he couldn't get up to much. I was a sort of hobble; he was my minder and I was his. He'd have liked to get further away, but petrol was rationed. The church was at least safe. My grandmother never went near it -- except feet first in her coffin, but that was years later, when she was buried in the same grave with him. Rotting together for eternity, one flesh at the last after a lifetime's mutual loathing. In life, though, she never invaded his patch; once inside the churchyard gate he was on his own ground, in his element. He was good at funerals, being gaunt and lined, marked with mortality. He had a scar down his hollow cheek too, which Grandma had done with the carving knife one of the many times when he came home pissed and incapable.

That, though, was when they were still 'speaking', before my time. Now they mostly monologued and swore at each other's backs, and he (and I) would slam out of the house and go off between the graves, past the yew tree with a hollow where the cat had her litters and the various vaults that were supposed to account for the smell in the vicarage cellars in wet weather. On our right was the church; off to our left the graves stretched away, bisected by a grander gravel path leading down from the church porch to a bit of green with a war memorial, then -- across the road -- the mere. The church was popular for weddings because of this impressive approach, but he wasn't at all keen on the marriage ceremony, naturally enough. Burials he relished, perhaps because he saw himself as buried alive.