THE THREE OF US: A FAMILY STORY

by Julia Blackburn

(Pantheon, 313 pages, $30 hardcover)

The late British poet and novelist Philip Larkin found a way -- much too earthy to repeat here -- for describing how "your mum and dad" can mess up your life.

He made his observation in 1971, by which time Julia Blackburn had indeed been messed up by Thomas and Rosalie, a violent, substance-abusing father and a vulgar, sexually obsessed mother. In their day lives, he was a poet, she a painter and, following Larkin, we can't be too quick to blame them because they were, "in their turn," inheritors of the misery of a previous generation of degenerates. Included in Blackburn's book are pictures of the "fools in old-style hats and coats," one a batty racist preacher who locked his son's genitals in a cage, the other a First World War vet whose hinted-at delinquencies with his favourite daughter probably contributed to her childhood suicide.

Blackburn's memoir is launched when Rosalie dies in 1999 after telling Julia, now an adult with children of her own, that she will finally be able to write about her.

And this is the story that Julia does tell, of her parents' divorce and of the childhood she spent with her mother. A childhood which gradually matured, at least in her mother's eyes, into a kind of deadly sexual competition. As Rosalie took in a series of male lodgers, hoping each would be "the one," her delusions were cruelly exposed as the men turned out, understandably, to be more interested in her daughter.

Hysterical recriminations and many trips to a string of nutty psychiatrists build up to a climax involving the suicide of one partic-ularly hapless lodger/suitor and Julia's leaving home.

Happiness, it's often said, "writes white." Which means it's boring and no one wants to hear about it. All happy families are alike, after all; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Reading a personal memoir like this, we expect a train wreck -- and Blackburn doesn't disappoint.

As with most of these efforts, especially given the vogue for "MiseryLit" and its blurring of the line between fact and fiction, there are moments when we're left to wonder if things really could have been as bad as they're made out to be. But of course, we know that London in the swinging '60s-- the sex, the drugs -- couldn't have been all it was cracked up to be. One always suspected the depressing sleaziness and dysfunction that Blackburn describes is closer to the truth.

The revelation of so many intimate horrors is what makes The Three of Us so readable, but it's Blackburn's writing that lifts it out of the crowded genre ghetto. An accomplished author of fiction and non-fiction, she gracefully advances along the different fronts of her story, aided by a memory that, even assisted by journals, letters and old pictures, seems remarkable.

And while a central player in the events she describes, she maintains an objective distance -- perhaps defensive -- from them. The text includes many black-and-white photos, recreating the curious effect we've all noticed when looking at pictures of ourselves from decades ago. Was that really me? Who is that person? What were they -- what was I -- thinking? The past is like that, another country even when it's our own.

Alex Good is a Cambridge writer.