Bad Blood
A Memoir (Text Only)
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From a childhood of gothic proportions in a vicarage on the Welsh borders, through adolescence, leaving herself teetering on the brink of the 1960's, Lorna Sage vividly and wittily brings to life a vanished time and place and illuminates the lives of three generations of women.
Lorna Sage’s memoir of childhood and adolescence is a brilliantly written bravura piece of work, which vividly and wickedly brings to life her eccentric family and somewhat bizarre upbringing in the small town of Hanmer, on the border between Wales and Shropshire.
The period as well as the place is evoked with crystal clarity: from the 1940s, dominated for Lorna by her dissolute but charismatic vicar grandfather, through the 1950s, where the invention of fish fingers revolutionised the lives of housewives like Lorna’s mother, to the brink of the 1960s, where the community was shocked by Lorna’s pregnancy at 16, an event which her grandmother blamed on ‘the fiendish invention of sex’.
Bad Blood is often extremely funny, and is at the same time a deeply intelligent insight by a unique literary stylist into the effect on three generations of women of their environment and their relationships.
Reviews
‘Bad Blood is pretty much in a class of its own… It is a measure of her achievement that she can turn the peculiarities of her own past – and they are peculiar – into a narrative that speaks for the whole of post-war Britian… This is not just an exquisite personal memoir, it is a vital piece of our collective past.’
Daily Telegraph
‘A wonderful book. Women need this kind of book but perhaps men need it more, to give the sort of understanding which we still lack of how girls actually grow up.’
Margaret Forster
About the author
Lorna Sage’s books include ‘Women in the House of Fiction’ (1992), ‘The Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English’ (1999), a short monograph on Angela Carter, and ‘Bad Blood’, which won the 2000 Whitbread Biography Award and became a number one bestseller. She died in January 2001.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
