A review of Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood

For honesty (and mythmaking): I first read Lorna Sage’s memoir Bad Blood in 2016 (4th Estate, 2000). I was not surprised it won the Whitbread Prize for Biography in 2000 (only a week before the author sadly died at the age of 57). With masterly craft, Sage described the emotional legacy of her typical English-middle-class dysfunctional family – demonstrating no family is typical, and no girl escapes her family’s particular brand of madness. Sage’s storytelling also confirms a family story can be stranger, funnier, and more intimate and painful, than any fiction. Sage was an English professor at UEA who, among her other publications on women writers, wrote Women in the House of Fiction (1992) and edited The Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English (1999).

Available to buy at Bad Blood by Lorna Sage | Waterstones