In the family photo collection of the novelist Julia Hamilton and her journalist daughter Arabella Byrne, there is a picture, taken on holiday in France, that wouldn’t seem all that out of place in many an Irish photo album.
In it, Arabella is about five years old, wearing her mum’s sunglasses and holding a wineglass to her lips, clearly aping her mother’s mannerisms.
“Like mother, like daughter,” people would laugh when they saw it framed in the family home. It’s a light-hearted picture, albeit one with a genuine darkness behind it.
In their joint memoir, In The Blood: On Mothers, Daughters and Addiction, the British mother and daughter explore their respective struggles with alcohol addiction, their eventual paths to recovery and the omerta within families that ensures that alcoholism gets easily passed down from generation to generation.
The book comes on the back of an article they co-wrote about their alcoholism, originally published in the Daily Mail in 2022. It garnered a huge reaction, to their surprise.
“So many people came out of the woodwork and said, ‘this is my experience, we have lived with alcoholism in my family for a long time’,” says Byrne. “It sort of dawned on us that we might be able to do something that captured the dissonance of the experience"
In it, Arabella is about five years old, wearing her mum’s sunglasses and holding a wineglass to her lips, clearly aping her mother’s mannerisms.
“Like mother, like daughter,” people would laugh when they saw it framed in the family home. It’s a light-hearted picture, albeit one with a genuine darkness behind it.
In their joint memoir, In The Blood: On Mothers, Daughters and Addiction, the British mother and daughter explore their respective struggles with alcohol addiction, their eventual paths to recovery and the omerta within families that ensures that alcoholism gets easily passed down from generation to generation.
The book comes on the back of an article they co-wrote about their alcoholism, originally published in the Daily Mail in 2022. It garnered a huge reaction, to their surprise.
“So many people came out of the woodwork and said, ‘this is my experience, we have lived with alcoholism in my family for a long time’,” says Byrne. “It sort of dawned on us that we might be able to do something that captured the dissonance of the experience"
