The papers have been full of reviews and interviews with the author Julie Myerson, who has written a novel which is, according to the Sunday Time, ‘a bold two-fingered salute to her attackers a few years back.’
I have a feeling that might include me.
Back in 2009, I was caught up in a minor, chattering-class spat about families and drugs, writing and betrayal. At one point, I was asked to appear on Newsnight before the Grand Inquisitor Jeremy Paxman to debate important moral matters with Julie Myerson but – unusually for me – I turned the offer down.
The previous Saturday, a newspaper interview with the author had told the story of how her teenage son Jake Myerson had become increasingly difficult – abusive, violent, using drugs – and had finally been locked out of the family home when he was 17. This was a heart-wrenching family tale which his mother felt she had to get published.
The interview gave me the creeps. Writers are always looking for material, but there was something about the self-justification – that it would be of help to other parents – which failed to convince me. Telling the story of your own teenage son’s problems was, I thought, an abuse of authorly power, not to mention unkind and humiliating to a young guy who had no public right of reply. It could only make the situation worse.
At the time, I was an op-ed columnist for the Independent, filing my copy on Sundays. Julie and her son were my theme that week (the full piece is below).
The whole Myerson family deserve sympathy but it is undeniable that, out of their shared misery, one of them has emerged with a book which will advance her career. Another, still in his teens and unable to present his version because he happens not to be a published writer, will be helped not one jot by his story being made public. Indeed, pinned down on paper, he will find it hard to move out of the teenage hellhole in which he has found himself.
Authors exploit those around them but until recently have done it through fiction, a medium which allows them a resolution and leaves their subjects with some sort of dignity. That has become old-fashioned. We prefer our reality straight, claiming that it is more honest, less slanted.
It is not. It merely causes more pain.
Timing is important for a columnist. I was the first to pick up on the story, but soon there was a media feeding frenzy. The Daily Mail, sensing a grave outrage against motherhood, moved into attack mode. The website Mumsnet joined the charge.
At some point, I was contacted by Newsnight. Was I prepared to appear on that night’s programme to debate with Julie Myerson about this, under the warm-hearted chairmanship of Jeremy Paxman?
By this time, I was feeling uneasy. I didn’t like the mob outrage and the forest fire of sanctimonious comments online. My piece had, I thought, been sympathetic, recognising the temptation for a writer to use material close to hand and to be blind to the power of words on the page.
So I turned down Newsnight’s offer, saying I had said everything I wanted to say in my column, and Julie Myerson had Jeremy Paxman to herself that night.
A few days later, at a launch party for a new book by Geoff Dyer, I found myself chatting in the same group as Julie Myerson and her husband Jonathan. She gave me a rather sweet smile, but he took me aside. Eyes blazing, he asked me if I had read his wife’s book. I told him I had no wish to and that wasn’t the point of my piece. Mr Myerson was in no mood for a discussion and I thought briefly we might have Gore Vidal/William Buckley-style tussle in the middle of the party.
Nervously, I made my excuses and backed away.
A few years later, the Myersons’ son Jake admitted that he had felt powerless and vulnerable when the book was published. His mother should have waited for 20 years and published then, he argued, and no one would have batted an eyelid.
But of course eyelid-batting is precisely what authors and publishers want.
The book sold well. I wrote, in a column that summer.
There is a niggling sense that we have all been taken for a bit of a ride on the PR express. Drugs, a middle-class family, a telegenic writer wrestling with her conscience: it was the perfect media storm, and has been played out to perfection.
And now? Julie Myerson waited, not 20 years, but 15 before giving the story another spin of the wheel as fiction. ‘I’ve always wanted to write things that feel brave,’ she has said, with just a touch of smugness.
I hadn’t thought about this ancient little brouhaha for years. Now, it occurs to me that I emerge from the saga as a bit of a wimp, turning down Jeremy Paxman, running away from a huffy husband. Julie, on the other hand, is still out there telling her truth, writing bravely and congratulating herself for it. Maybe that’s the true writer’s way.
But a decade and half later, I still think it was bad form to serve up her son’s misery as entertainment for the reading public. And I was probably even right to turn down the chance to be the voice of family values on Newsnight.
As for the Myersons, I hope that, a few years and a few books down the line, they are now a happy family once more.
***
TERENCE BLACKER, INDEPENDENT, 3 MARCH 2009
Such has been the level of emotional sharing over the past few days that merely reading a newspaper or watching the TV news has become an exhausting experience. There have been daily reports of the dying days of Jade Goody. Moving accounts of living with a handicapped child have been published. And this weekend the writer Julie Myerson explained why she has written an account of how her 17 year-old son became so out of control as a result of drug use that she and her husband severed ties with him, locking him out of the house.
On the face of it, Myerson’s book The Lost Child is at the respectable end of intimate disclosure. It is a hardback written by a talented and interesting writer. It will be reviewed in all the right places. Not the slightest trace of tabloid vulgarity attends it.
All the same, there is something distinctly off-kilter and disquieting about the project. Jonathan and Julie Myerson, both successful writers, have three children, the oldest of whom became dependant on cannabis in his teens. He dropped out of school, was abusive and occasionally violent. The Myersons told him that, if his behaviour continued, he would have to leave home. That, just after he turned 17, is what the boy did. The Myersons changed the locks on the family home. He was taken in by a friends’ parents and has not returned.
In interviews over the past year, Julie Myerson has referred to the terrible time she was having with her drug-taking son – it was partly what had directed her to write her last novel, she told the Independent last February. Now this account of the whole sad business, interwoven with the book she had been writing when it all happened, is to be published in May.
It will sell well. There is a hunger for unhappiness which was first tapped by the profitable market in lurid, clammy accounts of abusive childhoods. The Myersons believe – honestly, no doubt – that the most pressing reason for revealing their family secrets is to help others. “When we were in our darkest, deadliest hour, it would have been helpful to have read a book like this,” Julie Myerson has said.
Sometimes authors inhabit a parallel universe in which the written world becomes confused with the actual one. They fictionalise and distance real people, and real feelings. They forget that books stay around. It is not just that words, read and re-read, have the power to hurt, but that wounds which otherwise would have healed remain open.
The whole Myerson family deserve sympathy but it is undeniable that, out of their shared misery, one of them has emerged with a book which will advance her career. Another, still in his teens and unable to present his version because he happens not to be a published writer, will be helped not one jot by his story being made public. Indeed, pinned down on paper, he will find it hard to move out of the teenage hellhole in which he has found himself.
Authors exploit those around them but until recently have done it through fiction, a medium which allows them a resolution and leaves their subjects with some sort of dignity. That has become old-fashioned. We prefer our reality straight, claiming that it is more honest, less slanted.
It is not. It merely causes more pain.
