Read this is in today's Observer www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/mar/01/julie-myerson-novel-drug-addiction

Does anyone else have the uncomfortable feeling that I have on learning that she is writing about her son's drug problems? I know that writers often mine their own personal experiences for material but I think she's putting her literary endeavours ahead of her son here. From what I can gather, he is still young, his drug issues are ongoing, and although he is out of the family home, surely this is risking any possible future reconcilliation? I also baulk at the way she "weaves historical research about Yelloly with her disturbing account of her son's ejection from the family home" It just smacks of middle-class-writer angst.

My cynicism is further fuelled by my very strong suspicion that Julie Myerson is the author of Living with Teenagers - but that's another story...

I suspect the "Living with Teenagers" connection too, and it always used to make me think "eew". I suppose, in principle, this does too.

I can see that writing a narrative of a disturbing event can give you control and shape, and may benefit others who read it. But it must also be true that that power and control is the writer's first and foremost, and is shadowed by a power that is not held/exercised by those who may have shared the experience but have not shared in writing the narrative. And that is more true if the narrative is then published under a name.

And I know it's silly but I always think of how much A. A. Milne's son hated "Christopher Robin".

I am sure there will be plenty of outpourings of love and sympathy towards her son in her book but the blunt fact of the matter is that this book is hopefully (for Julie Myerson at least) going to be bringing money into the family home to feed and clothe her other two children - all on the back of her elder son's problem. I am sure it will shift more units than her musings on Yelloly and her water-colour album alone. Sounds like she is very much hedging her bets in a literary sense - not being able to swim in the same waters as all the other "my drug hell" books - trying to make it something other by weaving in all this other research that she can't bear to abandon.

Her son isn't lying in some gutter somewhere in a stupour - he's allegedly living with a friend's family and holding down a job in the music industry. Once it's published he's going to have a few people beating down his door I would think. Perhaps he has literary aspirations of his own and will write his own version of events? Somehow I am sure it would find a publisher.

I cannot stand Julie Myserson - navel-gazer extraordinaire.

That'll be why the Living with Teenagers column suddenly disappeared then! So she could put it all in a book as well.

Her son is only 17. It's not very old really, how sad that it has all ended like this, I would be distraught if I had had to throw one of my children out at that age. Also, if its been 'going on' for 5 years as she says, he must have started smoking dope or whatever at 12....very sad indeed. Personally I wouldn't want to write a book about it.

It is in one of the papers today that her son isn't too chuffed about this. No kidding. Wouldn't read it anyway as she is always sitting on the edge of her seat on Newsnight review desperate to get her point of view across as obviously it is the only one that matters!

Oh god you're right! She must have been the Living with Teenagers author!

Once went to a literary event where her husband was speaking. He came across as being utterly ghastly and indeed has done so in newspaper articles he has written since (I remember one about how proud he was about loathing football and how he ridiculed the sport constantly to his son, who loved it ) Poor kids. They don't stand much chance with those two tiresome egomaniacs for parents.

Here is the aricle with the son.

He does sound very difficult and immature - am familiar with the delusional self-justification of the habitual skunk user, sadly. Not to mention the stealing, inability to complete tasks, personality change, and self-pity (that might just be a teenage thing of course).

And I can see why a writer might write about this. But couldn't she have not published it. Or waited a decade or two?!

I've always really disliked her since I read an article she wrote about why she agreed with smacking and described hitting her 10-year-old son and how it helped him calm down and he really loved her for it

Not sure if it was the same son - was a while ago - but I thought you awful, awful cruel woman. Smacking debate aside - though I do think hitting children is wrong - to reveal the details of something so humiliating and personal about her child in the national press was so uncaring and she obviously gave no thought to the feelings of a child easily old enough to read that, understand it and also have his peers see it. Appalling.