Sophie Calon LONG GOING with Arabella Byrnee

Long Going

At 50, Sophie Calon’s father was a high-flying lawyer. At 55, he was found dead in Cardiff city centre at Christmas. Meanwhile he had pinballed between tents, homeless shelters, and prison cells. His story is a lesson in how alcoholism can consume a person – and a family.

Long Going is a powerful, unflinching memoir that sings with Calon’s love for her eccentric, witty father while recounting his drink-fuelled disintegration. In telling his story, Calon explores her family’s instability and pain as well as her own survival.

Sophie Calon

Sophie Calon was born and raised in Cardiff. State-educated, Sophie studied Classics at Oxford University then trained as a journalist in her hometown. Her writing has been published in The Guardian, The TLS, Literary Review, and the anthology Tales of Two Londons. Her story 'Cantlos' was runner-up for the 2021 Wild Writing Prize and published by Short Fiction. Sophie lives with her husband, daughter, cats, and cows on a hilltop near Hay-on-Wye, where they are returning nature to their surroundings.

In The Blood

In the Blood is a memoir in two voices, those of a mother and daughter both in the grip of the disease that has ravaged generations of women in their family. Julia, aged sixty-five, and Arabella, thirty-eight, ended up in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous just nine months apart.

In some ways it’s a predictable story; two addicts drank and destroyed and ransacked until they could drink no more. In others, it is entirely unlike any account of motherhood or addiction that has ever been told. This is not a recovery memoir, but rather an unflinching family drama spanning generations, whilst looking pain and shame directly in the eye.

Arabella Byrne

Arabella Byrne is a freelance journalist who lives in Oxford. She co-authored 'In the Blood' with her mother, Julia Hamilton.