Just the Three of Us. #3

In this memoir by Julia Blackburn, one picks up on the suttle differences Julia and her mother have in the beginning but the reader doesn't actually start to come into the actual problems of their relatioship. Where I am in the book, Julia has opened up and has really started to talk about her mother and all of the lodgers that come to stay with them, and also how much they mean to her mother and what it means for her when she is at home.

Julia reads from her diary and remembers all of the different lodgers that's had stayed with them, she remembers that her mom considered her to be compition when there were men in the house when she was only 15 or younger and these men were in there 40s. Her mother put the blame on her 13 year old daughter for having a man walk out on her, Julia states "she said it was my fault and I was trying to be her rival by flirting with him. Its true I liked him, he was very nice to me, but I don't think I flirted in anywayu I was thirteen" (27). Then Julia goes on to tell more of what her mom has told her in the past about the constant stream of men that enter there lives. She says "I can't help seeing him of course, but I am forbidden to even talk to him and sometimesmy mother tells me I must leave the room if he comes in" (28). Here I think that her mom is the person with the real mental issues and is forcing them onto her daughter and will cause them to have a broken relationship with her daughter.

Just the Three of Us: 2

In my outside reading book, i have gotten to know Julia(main character) quite a bit by now. She has relationship issues with her parents and is ver confused by them and one can see that through her memories when she looks through her past diary. Now that i am a bit farther into the book, the reader sees now that Julia has some self-esteem problems in addition to her relationship issues, "I look in the mirror above the sink. I don't see a face, just the details of a face--I smile at the mouth and it smiles back. But not in a very trusting way" (13-15). Here Julia looks at herself and sees herself but she just sees herself as a whole, or just a random person not the individual that she is. Julia doesnt see herself as anyone special. As i read through my book her mother came up, and we start to look into her mom and thats where her self-esteem problems may have developed.

As I read, Julia started to talk about how after her mother and her father slit her mom started to lodge people, specificly men. Her mother starts to have relationships with these men, 

"There was Bob the architect, he was the first and my  mother was sure he wanted to marry her; then Richard, the American painter with a withered leg; Ian, David, another Richard, Ken the conman and of course great-uncle Guy for a while..."(16).

seeing these relationships come and go and seeing her mom heartbroken and then happy again can make a girl confused and not know what to do. Through all of this (even though this really isnt that much) one can see that this is and will create problems for Julia and one can predict that it will only get worse for Julia and maybe even cause something to happen between Julia  and her mother. 

Just the Three of Us: 1

 Just the Three of Us by Julia Blackburn is a memoir about a herself, her drunken father and her relationship with her mother when her father left. From the very start of the book Julia states that "He (her father) was disastrous in so many ways, yet I never felt threatened by him. I could be frightened of the madness and the drunken rages, but I never doubted the honesty of his relationship with me and that was what really mattered"(3). She doesn't really know what to feel about her father and that he is a kind man and has love in his heart yet he has those "drunken rages" that scare her. 

This book reflects on her good and bad memories of her parents, then speaks her mind about the situations. Also the reader see's Julia's father and his problems and her mothers bad decisions and the reader will begin to not only see what went on in Julia's life but the reader is able grow with the character.