Bad Blood: A Memoir

Product Information

Sharon will be discussing ‘Bad Blood’ with Victor Sage, her father, and acclaimed author Louise Doughty at UEA Live on Wednesday 11 November. In a sense this is what autobiography is about: the ways in which your own story is not really yours at all, but a version of the tale of your parents or grandparents. These are the ways in which you become, as Steedman puts it, "not quite yourself, but someone else", and this is what makes it such a dissatisfying genre for those wanting a reassuring or comfortable description of the growth of an individual mind.

For some contemporary writers trips into the past signify revisionism, the irreverence of parody, the freedom to choose your literary forebears. For Diski it’s quite the perverse reverse. How the options narrow down, in the Diski world. How lavish she is with pain, and how crude sometimes, for all her intelligence and style, in the way she hands out the punishment.

Contact Us

a b c d e Fenton, James (13 June 2002). "The Woman Who Did" . Retrieved 21 October 2019. (subscription required) The book spans the 40s, 50s and 60s, the years from her unconventional upbringing in a filthy vicarage, through her council house teens to her graduation from Durham university. One of the most compelling sections is her analysis of the failings of her vicar grandfather, responsible for the ‘bad blood’ she is later believed to inherit. Without reverting to bitterness or emotionality, but instead approaching her grandfather as text — it is his diary she plunders for evidence of his depravity — Sage painstakingly pieces together the clues as to what drives his hypocritical and unethical behaviour, not only as vicar but as husband, father and man. She remembers there were always groups of students around, and people would come to stay for months on end. "This travelling procession of people. That was how life was." Did she never want them to go away so she could have her parents to herself? "Not then. Later, at various moments maybe. I think then I was OK with all that because there were lots of fascinating people usually in various states of interesting falling-to-bitsness. Lorna Sage's Bad Blood (2000) is an extraordinary literary work! I could not believe that it is non-fiction. I felt everything was so real as if it were a work of fiction by a great writer. Non-fiction books almost never feel real to me because they do not transcend the particular, the specific, the individual. Their meaning and reach are constrained by the connection to concrete facts, like a balloon that wants to soar high in the sky but is tied to a child's hand. Fiction books are able to much better convey the truth since they allow the reader to focus more on the humanness in general rather than on particular people or concrete events. 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.

Bad Blood is often extremely funny, and is at the same time a deeply intelligent insight by a unique literary stylist into the effect on three generations of women of their environment and their relationships. You dashed in and out as if saving the world wasn’t just more important than your kids, but more interesting, too ... Remember when you used to go to that feminist bookshop ... and I had to wait out on the street because, although I was only nine, they didn’t allow males in? ... I like being a rich young man with a portable telephone, instead of being an unwanted little boy standing outside a feminist bookshop.

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."

Reading provided an alternative world, a way of living apart in the midst of family turbulence. When her father returned from the second world war, the family moved from the old rectory to a newly-built council house. But the new possibilities presented by postwar reconstruction were shrouded by older patterns of English provincial custom and prejudice. In her own description, Sage was an "apprentice misfit". This sense of self fuelled her determination to make her own way on her own terms. For Sage, reviewing was serious criticism. Her habit was to read all the available published work of any author she was reviewing. She was deeply engaged by the idea of writing about literature before it became canonical. Her reviewing was an opportunity to forge a style that could be both intelligent and accessible. Life grew very hard for her. Her second marriage was under strain, but she was heroically supported by Sharon and a small circle of friends. At the time of her death, she had many projects in train and more to give to a literary culture she had done so much to shape. She is survived by Rupert Hodson, Vic Sage, Sharon and her granddaughter, Olivia. She was too young to go to school, but the school allowed her to sit in on classes with the other children so her mother could go to work. "It was wonderful. The children would treat me like a little doll. So all of these things conspired to make my growing up wonderful, really. It wasn't orthodox but it was fine."

Episode two - Favourite books from our guests

a b Sage, Victor (7 June 2001). "Diary". London Review of Books. Vol.23, no.11. p.37 . Retrieved 21 October 2019. (subscription required) They became tighter still when Sage became ill, around the same time. With her capacity for slyness and secrecy – just as she had when she wrote about giving birth to Sharon, keeping her contractions secret because she didn't want to have to go into hospital – she hid her illness. "Nobody knew, and she kept it that way for an unreasonable length of time. I knew just because I was there and part of the concealment. When she was ill, I would sometimes move into the house with her. That was how it continued until she died. So I had a very close relationship with her in the last year, and I'm so glad of that. It has been very important to [know] that I did everything I could, and that I don't feel any regret."

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." A week later Sage died in London as a result of emphysema, from which she had suffered for some years. [9] [3] She left behind the draft of the first part of a work on Plato and Platonism in literature, which, according to her former husband [ who?] in 2001, she had been working on intermittently for many years. [5] The posthumous collection Moments of Truth partly consists of reprinted introductions to classic works. [3] Publications [ edit ] Bad Blood has been split into three parts, which cover distinct periods in Sage's life - the first her early life at the vicarage in Hanmer, the second her transition to grammar school and living with her parents, and the third her surprise pregnancy at aged sixteen, and her determination to receive a University degree. These sections are peppered with photographs. Of Hanmer, Sage writes: 'So Hanmer in the 1940s in many ways resembled Hanmer in the 1920s, or even the late 1800s except that it was more depressed, less populous and more out of step - more and more isolated in time as the years had gone by.' 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.

At 15, she met Vic Sage, the man shortly to become her first husband. At 16, she was married and pregnant. At 17, she gave birth to her first and only child, Sharon. Undaunted, Sage continued to pursue her intellectual ambitions. She applied to Durham University to read English, and was awarded a scholarship. Her brilliance found a way through circumstances that might well have overwhelmed other women of her age and class. Ms Sage is a wonderful writer. The structure and style are somewhat unusual for a memoir, and I definitely appreciate that. This is a compendious, layered novel – see ‘historiographic metafiction’ in the narratology handbook – the sort of novel that intercuts time zones and genres of fiction (realism, fantasy) and so fleshes out the present’s bleakness. In the present, middle-aged Charlotte FitzRoy is having a breakdown, precipitated very likely (thinks the business-like psychiatrist who plies her with anti-depressants she doesn’t take) by the death of her daughter Miranda in a car-crash; though as Charlotte sees it, loss of her political faith, dating from the coming-down of the Berlin Wall, has had rather more to do with it. In the final section of the memoir Lorna became pregnant and married at age 16. She left the maternity ward one day, and took the first of her A-level exams the next day. She and her husband, Vic Sage, both graduated from the university in Durham with degrees in literature in 1964. Having absolutely no idea who Lorna Sage is/was, I ventured into the memoir because I was hungry for a woman's story—but not looking for trigger-warning events. I apologize for that; I just can't stomach horrible news on top of what's already out there.