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.