Lorna Sage, professor of English at the University of East Anglia, has written an almost unbearably eloquent memoir of the unlikely childhood and adolescence that shaped her. Nothing else I have read, save Carolyn Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman, destroys so successfully the fantasy of the family as a safe place to be or describes so well the way in which rage, grief and frustrated desire are passed down the family line like a curse, leaving offspring to live out the inherited, unresolved lives of their forebears. She was aware from a very young age how glamorous her parents were, especially her mother. She remembers clomping alongside her on a walk across the park, Sharon in ugly Clarks shoes, her mother, barefoot and wearing a slinky catsuit zipped down to her navel. "I always think of going to nightmare parent-teacher nights at my junior school and my dad turning up in a brown velvet suit and my mother wearing a Biba outfit. I was horrified, of course. My school friends would say it must be fantastic to have such groovy young parents, but I just wanted them to be middle-aged." Spending time in a post-war Welsh vicarage with Lorna's lusty vicar grandfather, perpetually sour and angry grandmother, and her ditsy mother----none of whom could manage to lift a broom or to teach Lorna to bathe, apparently---was definitely one of those "Gee, I didn't know people lived like that" experiences. Again....a plus for me Moving out of the vicarage and into "council housing" once her father returned from the war provided yet another look into that period of time.

Sunetra says: The title really draws you in, and it’s a great idea for a front cover. This story is about a girl called Grace who committed many murders, brutally and calmly. She’s murdered members of her family but she’s in jail for a murder she didn’t commit. This book is an open confession of all the murders she did commit. So many great quotes, and wonderful that she managed to get this memoir written and published as her life was coming to an end, it won the Whitbread Book Award a week before she died at the tender age of 57. The last five years of her life were increasingly dominated by the illness that eventually caused her death. Sage did not suffer fools gladly, and often the world seemed increasingly full of them. Although physically diminished by illness, she continued to write and teach with undiminished energy. Her Cambridge Guide was published in 1990, but what preoccupied her most was the completion of the memoir which provides such a compelling portrait of her as a young women. Even though their marriage was to end in divorce, the intellectual and emotional partnership Sage established with Vic was to last throughout her life. Their careers ran in parallel; both graduated with first-class degrees in 1964, both moved on to Birmingham University, where Sage studied at the Shakespeare Institute. In 1965, she became an assistant lecturer in English at the recently established University of East Anglia. In 1967, Vic took up a similar post at the same university. a b Sage, Victor (7 June 2001). "Diary". London Review of Books. Vol.23, no.11. p.37 . Retrieved 21 October 2019. (subscription required)

Contact Us

Ms. Sage's prose is fabulous! She is an extraordinarily accomplished writer with a wonderful turn of the phrase. Just take this "caressing shapeless moments until they wriggle into life" phrase from the epigraph. Reading this I instantaneously recalled people who had this gift. How many of us, though, would have the talent to describe them in this apparently frivolous yet extremely precise way? A metaphor like that carries more meaning than a faithful and detailed account of real-life behavior. Ivo says: High Fidelity captured being a music fan just as I was getting into music. I didn't know most of the music that was being referenced but I enjoyed that sense that you could bond with people over it, be a music snob and use your knowledge as a weapon. Fenton, James (13 June 2002). "The Woman Who Did" . Retrieved 21 October 2019. (subscription required) They had always been close, but more so when Sharon gave birth to her daughter. "She absolutely adored Olivia. Having that pressure off with another generation – and a girl! – was when we started becoming much closer."

The institution that she joined was small, intense and experimental. Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson were colleagues. The Shakespearian critic and scholar, Nicholas Brooke, who had taught Sage at Durham, was also there, as was the writer, Jonathan Raban. Both became close and lasting friends and discerning readers of her work.and her plunge into total disgrace when she becomes pregnant at age 16 having not even realized that she'd actually had intercourse. The chapters that cover her pregnancy and childbirth are fascinating, as is Sage's revelation that she didn't have to give into the stigmatization of unwed, or at least teenaged, motherhood. After hiding her condition and attending school so that she can enroll in university, waiting until the last minute to get to the hospital even though she knows her baby is breach, and insisting on leaving said hospital before she's discharged, Sage brings home a beautiful, complacent baby whom she promptly deposits with her parents so that she can go to college. I am not judging here AT ALL. She is merely repeating her own story, in which she was raised by her own grandparents. She concludes, "Certainly it was a lot easier to have a baby than to be delivered of the mythological baggage that went with it." Ms Sage is a wonderful writer. The structure and style are somewhat unusual for a memoir, and I definitely appreciate that.

The Guardian ranked Bad Blood at number 89 in its list of 100 Best Books of the 21st Century in September 2019. [3] Release details [ edit ] Lorna Sage was a professor of English Literature, a distinguished literary critic and a regular reviewer for the Observer, the New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books. She was born during the Second World War, in 1943, and lived with her ‘rather put-upon’ mother at her grandparents’ vicarage, while her father, an army captain, was away on active service. It is undoubtably well written with some really interesting parts, but overall wasn't that impactful for me. It also ended just as I was starting to get more invested in the plot, which was a little disappointing. a] rich, justly acclaimed autobiography ... this almost perfect memoir is a tribute to imperfection' Independent stars. It was a surprise to read about the unusual childhood of Lorna Sage, a well known literary critic. While her father was away fighting in World War II, young Lorna and her mother lived with her grandparents in a vicarage in Hanmer, Flintshire. Her grandparents had a terrible marriage and were constantly fighting. Her philandering minister grandfather loved to frequent the pubs. He was very bright and passed on his love of reading to Lorna. Her relatives wondered if Lorna had inherited his "bad blood" because they had many interests in common. Her grandmother was useless when it came to cooking and cleaning, and spent most of her time complaining about men, eating sweets, and missing the comforts of her childhood home.

The "fierce monogamy" of Sage's parents took on a violence of its own: their intimacy allowed no one in and made orphans of their two children. Her father, a distant figure, happiest during the war when he had a role and a mission, later gallantly protected his spouse from the passions of her family - and particularly those of Lorna, fiery and bookish and thus an inheritor of Grandpa's bad blood. One reviewer said that parts of the book stretched belief. That part for me was when she said she couldn't remember having sex and was incredulous to find herself pregnant. Oh well...we all have our coping mechanisms.