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A literary memoir from the highly regarded literary critic and academic, Lorna Sage, which was the winner of the Whitbread Prize for Biography 2000. We follow her story from childhood in the Welsh borders, through the difficulties of adolescence, to the brink of the 1960s. "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. "...not just an exquisite personal memoir, it is a vital piece of our collective past" "Daily Telegraph".
Synopsis
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.
Book Details
Publisher:
Fourth Estate
Publication Date:
02-Jul-2001
ISBN:
9781841150437
Guardian review
Bad Blood by Lorna Sage review
Victoria Segal the guardian Sat 06 November 2010
In this 10th-anniversary edition of Lorna Sage's Whitbread prize-winning memoir of growing up in north Wales, her daughter, Sharon Tolaini-Sage, quotes a letter her late mother wrote to her publisher about an "autobiographical book" she was planning: "It doesn't yet have a title, alas, but . . . I'm still convinced it could be interesting." It's an understatement: Bad Blood exerts a deep and enduring fascination, its ruthlessly precise dissection of family politics pungently evoking specifics head lice, underwear, children's games as well as chord-striking universal themes disappointment, infidelity, isolation. Her grandfather, a philandering vicar, looms over the book, the taint in Sage's veins, but the other characters are equally vivid, not least her fat, furious grandmother. Sage becomes pregnant at 16 yet overcomes this to forge a new beginning: her own kind of family and an academic career. Her teacher's report, she notes with pleasure, "warned that my shyness concealed a corrupt character", which "went down well in English departments". Proof that, beyond the shackles of family, there's a whole world out there.
