My Life with Bonnie and Clyde, by Blanche Caldwell Barrow, Clyde Barrow's sister-in-law

Has anybody here read this book? I found it VERY good and VERY interesting and it seems to shatter a lot of the popular beliefs and myths about Bonnie and Clyde.

If that is the book written a very long time ago, I read it when I was about 13, just after the movie came out in 1967, the book was reissued.

I just saw the movie not long ago, I don't think it romanticized the story that much. It looked like a pretty dreary life.

Well it was a lot more romanticized than the real case, that's for sure, especially from Blanche's account: one thing the movie leaves out is the part where they get in a car wreck and Bonnie was severely burned and cut up, her chest caved in, her chin cut to the bone, she had to be carried everywhere and Clyde had to keep her doped up on Amytal to kill the pain. Another thing, Clyde and Buck wound up many times with buckshot in them from gunfights, and they took a lot of buckshot out of Buck with tweezers but Clyde wouldn't let anybody take his out.

Though one surprising thing about it, in the movie when they carjack Gene Wilder's character and his girlfriend (who in real life was the undertaker who embalmed Bonnie and Clyde when they died), when Bonnie finds out he's a mortician she has Clyde get them out of there and they just drop them. In real life, Clyde promised not to kill them if they didn't try anything funny, he let them out of the car and asked if they had any money, the man said 25 cents, so Clyde gave him $5 to get them back home or to wire home for more money to get back on.


And I don't know that this could be the same book because it didn't get published until after Blanche died and she died in the 1980s.

Oh you are right, I am so stupid. The book I read was co-written by Clyde's sister, and Bonnie's mother. I just heard "book" and thought of the one I read.

Yours must be better, as it was written by someone who was there.

I didn't know his sister and her mother wrote a book, I might have to look into that one.


I found Blanche's to be VERY good, and in the parts added by the editor after Blanche's death, it's funny to hear about the escapades she had when she got out of prison, nothing that could compare to when she was with Bonnie and Clyde, but humorous little stuff.

When the women who discovered her manuscript, was living with Blanche and her husband, it was said Blanche got jealous because her husband paid a lot of attention to the other woman. But Blanche broke it to her gently, she explained (and Blanche was a Sunday school teacher at this time) that she and her husband still felt like newlyweds and still liked to chase each other around the house naked, and of course they couldn't do that with guests. That's not something you'd expect to hear, least of all from a Sunday School teacher, especially back in the so conservative 50s.