A potent dose of mother courage
Julie Myerson has caused a storm with revelations about her drug-using son. Kate Kellaway says it is a book that had to be written
Kate Kellaway writing in The Observer, Sunday 15 March 2009

"Write about what you know" may be good advice. But writing about "who" you know is something else entirely, especially if the "who" is a member of your family.

Blake Morrison's mother was said to have had reservations about his memoir And When Did You Last See Your Father?. Hanif Kureishi's sister was not happy about her brother's portrait of her in The Mother, even if it was disguised as fiction. And Frank McCourt's memoir, Angela's Ashes, seems to have offended half of Limerick.

The Lost Child: A True Story
by Julie Myerson
Bloomsbury,
£17.99

Perhaps it is no accident that memoirs about children by their parents often focus on those unable to answer back. Mothers (Rachel Cusk, Anne Enright, Kate Figes) write about their struggles with babies. Autistic children are given voice (George and Sam by Charlotte Moore) and mental illness is beyond the reach of retaliatory comment (Michael Greenberg's Hurry Down Sunshine being the most recent example). All these books have received friendly reviews. Yet no one who has even glanced at a newspaper recently will have missed the explosion of outrage against Julie Myerson for writing a memoir about her teenage son and his cannabis addiction.

For Myerson, judgment day came early - before her book had even been published. And some commentators (Alexander Chancellor in the Guardian, Minette Marrin in the Sunday Times) did not even pause to register what sort of a book she had written (describing it as a novel), let alone wait to read it.

The chorus of disapproval has been extreme, shrill and personal; if Britain did a line in fatwas, Myerson would have been for it. The argument has been that she has broken the ultimate rule: she has written about her troubled young son in a way that can only damage him further. And, naturally, the critic that everyone has been listening to with most attention is Jake Myerson, the subject of the book, handsomely paid by the Daily Mail to tell his story.

He has eloquently denounced his parents and claims he was opposed to publication from the start (his mother's account is different).

Writing always starts as a private act. And it is easy to see how The Lost Child evolved. Julie Myerson was meant to be working on another book about Mary Yelloly, an early 19th-century Suffolk watercolourist who died aged 21.

While researching her subject, her beloved 17-year-old son, who had become hooked on cannabis, was undergoing a change of character. He had become violent (knocking his mother down, perforating her eardrum). He stole from the family, lied and - the final straw - tried to introduce her younger children to drugs. After two years of turbulence, Myerson threw him out, hoping that what the drug experts advised - tough love - would work, that he would hit rock bottom, ask for help. Meanwhile, her life and work started to merge like dyes that were not fast - they bled into one another. Her book became a way of continuing to be involved with her son. If losing him felt like bereavement, writing about him was keeping him under her roof. And perhaps, in the writing, Myerson experienced what life would not permit: the illusion of control. Writing the book was, in the most complicated sense, a maternal act.

Read he rest of this full and thoughtful review online here.