How Alcohol Poisoned One Family

ONE DAY AT A TIME –

Nov. 1, 2024 – 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. 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.”