4 pubes will become a Lily Allenesque YouTube smash.

The first single with be called 4 pubes - straight to no 1!

I think he will shoot to fame by releasing an album and having every Guardian-reading teenager in the country falling desperately in love with him

I suspect you are spot on there, Mrs B.

Oh, I sooooo agree with mrsbaldwin.

Here are my predictions for Jake Myerson's future (with apologies for their appalling cynicism, if he himself is reading!)

Spends a bit more time dossing about smoking dope/playing guitar etc (whilst mum and dad earn more money writing about it).

Sees the light one day whilst lolling in dingy bedsit reading philosophy book or similar.

Signs up for degree at ex-poly/new university and gets a First (for added irony, this will be in Psychology).

Then either:
*decides to do a PhD and earns a bit of extra on the side writing articles about how it felt to be the subject of a book by his mum (taking a leaf out of her book, you see), before getting a part-time junior lecturing job and eventually climbing to tenure
or:
*discovers having got his degree he's competing for work with other younger, redbricks and Oxbridges - mum and dad help out by ringing round various contacts fixing up work experience/internships in media/PR or other similar field, one of whom eventually gives him a job.

In both scenarios he ends up fine - and beats the kids who all wanted similar jobs too, to pole position.

We'll see if I'm right

On the dilemma of what should educated middle-class parents do when a son wants to be a rock musician, one couple I know faced that situation. They told their son that he had their full blessing to pursue his career as a rock musician - provided the first million he earned, he gave half to Mum and Dad so that they could take early retirement from their teaching jobs.

They are now following his rock career with great interest - and with increasing desperation to get out of teaching.

yeah, get rid of the guitar and sign him up for the army cadets immediately.

shall i chuck out ds' guitar??



no oxbridge/lawyer route for him anyways

For those of you without teens yet, I can assure you Jake M is the archetypal middle class teen who doesn't want to do Oxbridge and/or become a doctor or lawyer, but wants to be a musician instead. There are lots and lots of them about.

Unfortunately, for him, he has the Myersons as parents.

Poor boy. No doubt he will pull himself together in the end and end up as, erm let me think, a novelist???

i think jm and her husband are just namby pamby arty farty clueless parents.
at the first mention of Fuck from my dc's and i would be Furious

It is - I love it - gut wrenchingly miserable and so, so funny at the same time!

Well she doesn't use their actual names .......

God that's a funny book.

Dittany - I don't think there's any disguise in Heartburn is there - her husband the columnist having an affair with a very tall women whose feet are sort of splayed??

Slambang having parents who have no respect for your boundaries or needs as a child is damaging. Having a parent who uses your life as material in their writing career is probably even more so. There can't be many children who have grown up with that experience - the only one I can think of is Nora Ephron who said that her scriptwriter parents used to put scenes from their family life into the films they made. She went on to write Heartburn - a thinly disguised Roman a Clef about the breakdown of her marriage.

I didn't say they put him out on the street easily but they certainly did it and Julie Myerson has seen fit to write a book about it, despite the fact it seems that her son didn't want her to.

I'm not going to argue about what caused his drug use because i don't think it is the main problem here despite what the Myersons keep claiming. Lots and lots of teenagers smoke cannabis, some of them very heavily. Not every child gets thrown out of their home for doing so. The fact that they are branding their son a drug addict across every media outlet they can find to appear on is outrageous in my opinion.

When i read lwt the children/young people had various crises and jm seemed to be in a dreamworld gazing at them helplessly remembering them as babies.The H didn't seem to be very supportive and they didn't seem to present a united front.

Parenting style in the early 90s did rather focus on loving the children,bfing on demand and basically giving them as much as you could and the rest would naturally fall into place.There was a lot less emphasis on boundaries and a lot of them were probably treated as equals and quite spoilt.

I don't agree with her documenting and selling the dcs lives but i do feel she seems to have been completely at a loss when her children didn't turn out to be well behaved and it doesn't sound like she stood up to them at all.
I feel sympathetic though towards her because poor parenting[and lets face it there wasn't family centres and parenting classes then certainly not for the middle classes]has led to a nightmare scenario with her dcs disrespecting her and each other.
I also think when teenagers get older they should think for themselves a bit and have some of the responsibility for the way they behave.

What was shocking in lwt was how ott the kids were and how passive the mum was~they were probably tring to get a response from her!

It does raise interesting questions for all writers who "use" their family dramas in their work.

Wow "four pubes" I imagine that would be damaging rather than a bit of suffering then (in reference to whoever it was who said earlier on this thread that this experience wouldnt damage Jake)

I feel sorry for all her kids and am glad my mother wouldnt behave as theirs has

Dittany - I don't think they put him out on the streets easily and then wrote a book to justify it, do you?

I assume there must have been genuine distress, trauma and despair there to take that action. I assume they love him as much as I love my ds (although I can't really believe that anyone can).

Whatever we feel about writing about your children it does not make them take drugs. Heavy skunk use is not the same as a gentle toke on a spliff. It does affect behaviour, brain development and can be addicitive.

LWT ended when one of her kids ("Jack") was told by his friends, who had all been reading it for ages and laughing at him behind his back e.g. about the fact that JM had written about his four pubic hairs.

The kids confronted JM and she agreed to stop writing it. "Jack" had his say in the Guardian and revealed that his friends now all called him "four pubes".

How did LWT end?

The way the Living With Teenagers column ended was bad enough. But to follow that with an even worse betrayal? Unbelievable.

And I'm sorry, but her partner's lame attempts at justification don't go anywhere near excusing it. Smacks of all that adult moral panic about drugs that I was so dismissive of as a teenager myself. Would just make any teenager reading think huh, adults know sod-all about drugs so I won't listen to a word they say.

When I was that age, it was poor Leah Betts. We were so unimpressed by all the adults rushing around and panicking and being determined to find the evil dealer who had given her the E - because we all knew full well it wasn't Mr Evil Drug Dealer out of some Hollywood movie, it would have been one of her mates with no bad intentions. In some ways, moral panic killed the poor child. (I never even took E myself, being too much of a scaredy-cat but I was a bloody expert compared to the authorities being quoted in the papers.)

Slambang as Jake says she's been writing about her children since he was two. In her Independent columns she wrote about them under their real names when they were very young.

Who says he's wasted his life? He's only 20. Somehow he managed to get three AS levels whilst wasting it. He's also taken two university courses according to him. The jury is out on whether he is addicted to drugs, and it's not like he's a heroin or crack user.

It seems more like the Myersons exaggerated his drug problems whilst downplaying their own ineffectual parenting in order to justify putting him out on the street when he was seventeen.

Oh, sorry. I stand corrected. I stopped getting the Grauniad Weekend ages ago!

No, the older boy is Eddie in LWT. Jack is the youngest boy.

wasn;t there an immense hoo har about the younger two getting stick at school for LWT and now this ??

I don't condone JM's cashing in on her kids (Remember a column about Becca's Periods?) but admit I loved LWT in a voyeuristic car crash type way.

But FGS there seems to be such spite and vitriol towards JM and her family - a family that has to all intents lost their beautiful son to drugs.

They have gone through hell. Can you feel no sympathy at all for a mother who has seen her talented, charming child throw everything away, steal, lie, drop out of school, waste his life?

And no, we can't blame his drug addiction on her writing because he was obviously deeply involved before his mum's writing about family trivia was exposed.

Yes - they probably made lots of mistakes as parents but who hasn't? If I can look back when ds is 20 and say my only mistake was being too liberal then that's probably a pretty good track record.

There but for the grace of god go any single one of us who is a parent of a child growing up in the 21st century.

I've been talking about this whole debacle with DH and I'm pretty upset about how JM has behaved. Life With Teenagers was shocking reading at times, but I took it at face value - an honest, gutsy attempt to print one person's reality of parenting (I didn't realise at the time it was done without the kids' consent). To find out later that JM was writing behind the kids' backs and now to see that she carried on with the column (with judicious ommisions) while in the middle of a family crisis, feels dishonest in the extreme. It makes me feel that I was somehow complicit in her actions through reading it and I don't like that feeling at all. I think the commissioning editor of the collumn has a lot to answer for.

He is "Jack" in LWT, Jake in real life.

Monkeytrousers

I can see where you are coming from

her deed is NOT what it could be

I would use the word 'bizarre' to describe selling her sons 'story' like that

I fear he may use the word 'unforgivable'

lwt was infact a 'what NOT to do' manual

Halleluljah!! FINALLY she admits it! I've only just come back to this thread - I only just posted onto the other one what would happen if we were wrong and she WASN'T the author of LWT - would Mumsnet get sued - but now see that that's all academic now.

What an unbelievable mess. I would like to see her on TV defending her position in the light of her admitting this.

Hey Monkeytrousers1, maybe you haven't twigged about the current issue, that she has written a book called The Lost Child about Jake's problems (supposedly with skunk) and her eventually throwing him out on the street at the age of 17. He is (understandably) very angry with her for writing about him again.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/adult_fiction/713727-Julie-Myerson-why-am-I-not-surprised-that-a-book?pg=13

FWIW from what I heard her say on the radio one of the reasons he is no longer in her care is because they asked him to leave because of his drug use.

I honestly think her time would have been better spent nuturing her family instead of bitching about them in the newspapers

LWT disturbed me deeply. I could never understand why she seemed to accept their appalling behaviour as normal. She clearly loved them all very much, but it didn't seem normal to me - I don't have teenagers, but I have friends who do. They aren't easy, but they aren't that bad. And I also used to worry about the impact on the children as and when their identities were known - I couldn't see it would stay a secret forever.

And the Myerson thing has been disturbing me (separately) for the past week. I saw an article in the Guardian today by her husband attempting to justify what they did - their decision to ask their son to leave, and her reasons for publishing a book about it. He did a good job convincing me on the first point, a much less effective job convincing me on the second one. His argument that it's a "warning to other parents" seems hollow now I know she spent the last 2 years writing anonymously about how vile her children are.

This compunction to live your life in print is very odd. She's a writer, she writes, she writes about stuff she knows about - I get that. But I don't get why you would expose your children to public scrutiny like that. It's not as if they gave their consent. I would be utterly mortified if one of my parents had discussed my failings so publicly.

He's 20 now so no longer a minor, oranges (& no longer in her care, either )

Oh I am using up a year's worth of s on this story, what she has done & is still doing is (are?) so wrong

Do laws about childrens' privacy protect them from their own parents? I can't believe you can get away with exposing a minor in your care like this.

They have lost the plot though

The article about bullying his 16 year old girlfriend to have an abortion makes me want to bite my hand off

what a fucking mess

I found LWT oddly compelling. I hated it, but I read it anyway .

I just don't get why anyone would write about their children in a way that made said children seem so utterly unpleasant.

Maybe they are that obnoxious, but why would you put that all over a newspaper, publish a book of the collected columns once you are "outed" to said children, and then go on to write yet another book about your offspring's life?

(Even my mother twigged that LWT was her btw, and she doesn't really "do" the Internet. I think the denials in the Telegraph yesterday were a little odd.)

You're right - who knows? I'm just putting myself in the shoes of her children and I guess you are too. You are clearly made of stronger stuff than me!

suffering is not the same as damaged. We all suffer fgs.

'Jake' will soon forgive her when the royalties p[ay for his first car.

Why 'Jake', MT? That is his name, poor sod. I doubt he'll be taking anything from her ever again.

PMSL

"You don't know that her kids aren't damaged MT. I think that's a bit of an assumption to be honest."

Like everything on this thread is anything else.

I'm off out now btw.

FWIW I suspect her children have suffered and will suffer for ages thanks to their mother writing the column/book. How can it be helpful for a teenager to have his or her laundry hung out to dry for all the world to see............

I suspect it will shape them in some way (minor or major) for years tbh.

I'm not being particulalty sympathetic with her Spice - she did a daft thing - maybe - who knows? 'Jake' will soon forgive her when the royalties p[ay for his first car.

It's the over reaction to her supposed 'crime' thats confusing me. Had she sold her kids into sex slavery, I can't imagine the invective would be so different.

MP, i'd excect nothing more from the guardian talkbpoards!

Her kids are not damaged? How on earth can you say that with what is happening now?
And with what has happened to Jake, by his own admission?

You don't know that her kids aren't damaged MT. I think that's a bit of an assumption to be honest. I would have been horrified and felt completely exposed and exploited if my mother had served up my growing pains as latte fodder and I think it would have left me with massive trust issues.

Would you really have been fine if your mother had done this? Really?

I didn't find the column boring - I found it shocking. I stopped reading it after a few months becasue it made me so angry that someone would let their child talk to them like that.
ANd Her kids may well be damaged from having their private lives publicised.

Which kids are not damaged?

MT, I don't get where you are coming from either.

had a look at the the guardian comments pages and was pleased to see a 'why are we discussing this triva when there are starving children in Africa' post

<polishes stereotypes>

The column wasn't like that. It was mostly quite boring. Dealing with the minutiae of domesticity with teenagers. And, as plenty MN threads show us, many of us have made worse mistakes.

She hasn't killed anyone, her kids are not damaged, and they will get over it having all learned something probably

She is being discussed because she has written a book and done countless interviews on the back of it. I can't see how in any way that's knocking her when she's 'down'. She's asked for it - it's not like she's some publicity-shy person whose been thrust against her will into the public eye is it? The irony is that if she and her husband just shut the fuck up, I'm sure it'd all go away but they do keep on doing interview after interview after interview.

I'm not entirely sure why you're being so sympathetic MT

LOL at Guardian talkboards. Jake is probably their ideal reader.

we are being nice

the Guardian talkboards are populated by child-free dope-smokers

they are combusting

Good!

Well, it's not one of the MN journos I know. And I think Myerson's style is quite distinctive. Of course, you can change your style but her voice is so clear when she's writing about her home life, not sure it would be possible to maintain a completely different voice as a regular poster on MN.

It's a difficult one, Monkeytrousers. In a sense this website has inadvertently added to the furore surrounding her family. But at the same time there are issues of valid discussion around the case, which are being kicked across the media anyway.
Re: the point about drama being good for writing but bad for families, that could be true of any of us, when we, say, write about what our terrible child..mother has done here, we might get relief and support but perhaps that is not what is best, perhaps we need to focus less on venting and more on solving the situation...
not that we're writing a weekly column though!

Agree, edam. Just something someone said earlier, on another thread, and something nagging at the back of my mind about the identity of one of the journo types...

Down? In what sense is she down?

Jake is down, & she's kicked shit out of him

doubt it, she makes her living exposing the everyday trivia of her own life, why would she share it for free?

Plenty of hacks on here but I've not come across one who would do the dirty on their own children like this.

She hardly desrves the pitchforks at dawn treatment. Wasn't there another thread about kicking someone when they're down? Not nice.

Is myerson a mumsnetter, d'ya think?

I think the saddest thing about this whole episode is that probably , and of course I am speculating, the writing and the tolerating bad behaviour fed off each other. A dramatic home episode becomes food for a column rather than a crisis needing solving. Perhaps I am terribly cynical but it seems to me that she may have let her teenagers get away with more because, well, you know, it was a story and she was caught up in the drama of it all?

She's always on Newsnight Review.

Oh dear, you all seem to know who Julie Myerson is, I have not a clue

I hadnt heard of her at all until reading this thread.........

In one of the columns she said her son called her "a stupid c*nt". Jeez. She also found packets of cannabis in both sons' jeans.

This whole episode is beginning to look like a huge cry for help on her part. Nobody is setting any boudaries - the Myersons let their children behave in the worst possible way and then the editors of the newspapers, publishers and her literary agent encourage Julie to spill the beans.

It's like a battle

It is good fun looking at the History on wiki isn't it?

no effie you are right

I find it depressing that all the Guardian readers seem to have been congratulating themselves that their teens weren't as bad as all that

no-one comes out of this well, do they?

I think a lot of people have guessed this - not only the ladies of mn. A friend announced it to me as fact over a year ago. And remember how the column ended? With "Jack's" friends embarrassedly admitting they'd known for ages? That's an ever-widening circle of people.

And I do wonder. The column was a piece of writing, but tied subtly yet ineluctibly to the real. The Guardian editor states that much of the response was grounded in relief that these teenagers were "real" yet "worse" than readers' own offspring. Myerson says they were composites and we can also assume were shaped by the force of writing.

So I don't think we should assume the "real" teenagers are quite as bad as their portrayal. Goodness knows, they're going to spend enough time shaking that assumption off.

Still ... the power of mumsnet!: "The internet alive with speculation" indeed!

BTW who can read Wiki edits? I'd be interested to know when it started claiming she was the author of the columns

What tmmj just said. I thought it was an appalling way for people to treat each other.

youngvisiter...you made me laugh ...and you were so quick to 'headlinify'...a talent

So let me get this straight, JM can call her son "4 pubes" so it gets chanted at him when he is at school but she goes in a huff when he sells his story to the Daily Mail?

She sounds like a self absorbed idiot.

The point isn;t whether their behaviour was good - it obviously was awful and quite shocking, but nothing that she did in writing that column was going to help that situation.

Why do I feel angry? Because she wrote highly personal accounts of her children's lives, arguments, personal details (eg the pubic hair thing) and published them without their knowledge let alone their consent. So now everyone they meet knows all the worst details of their teenage lives AND that will stay with them for hte rest of their lives.

nothing outrageous? you think its ok and normal for teenagers to eff and blind at their parents?

it certainly was never normal when i was a teenager and it won't be normal when my sons are teenagers. i was brought up to respect my parents and that is how i am bringing up my parents.

one of those excerpts says something like 'she told me i fucked up every meal i made -i sighed and carried on stirring'

would you really just sigh if youwere spoken to like that? by your CHILD?????

Those columns made me very cross,why are parents so scared of their children? They do them no favours at all and then are really outraged when they behave appallingly.

My daughter is dealing with her sons speaking so nastily to one another and to their parents at the moment; she doesn't just go ,'Oh, darling, that's not nice,' She gives them what for!!

I am becoming an Old Fogey, I shouted at teenagers on the bus last week!

I feel really angry about this and so sorry for those poor kids. Stupid stupid self centred woman. She'd better start saving her royalties to help her children pay their therapists.

Soak up?

I don;t get the zeal with which people are condemning her. I occasionally read the teenage column, and didn't catch anything outrageous in it. Parents with teenagers have to deal with them smoking pot. It helps people knowing that other people are going through the same thing.

And she wrote the explanation of why she did it in The Guardian months ago. Why is this news now?

This is a somewhat disingenuous thing for the editor to say:

"What we now know – but did not know then – was that the Myerson family was in the grip of a family crisis. Had I known that, I like to think that I would have put aside my editor's appetite for a great column, and advised Julie not to publish, directing her instead to people who might have been able to help them and their son."

Myerson talked about her child's drug problems in the Independent in Feb 08 saying "It has been the most traumatic thing that has ever happened to us" - this was several months before the column stopped, and it only stopped because the children found out about it.

It's a horrid case of everyone trying to sweep up spilt milk

(is that even an expression?)

Did a random search of teh Guardian's cached pages and this one came up which seems quite apposite now

The Guardian editor thingie is a bit wet though, isn't it> @We thought we could keep it secret from the teenagers forever.| How can they have really thought that????????

Oh dear how embarrassing. I feel sorry for her now.

> Julie begged her children's forgiveness.

Until the next book

awww what a cock up

It is all very sad. It feels, oh I don't know, it isn't just cos of us discussing it surely? There must have been speculation elsewhere. Those poor other kids.

well-i am a julie defender but my god. if my children ever spoke to me the way the children in that column spoke to her they would be a)thrashed to within an inch of their lives b) living in a bedsit

how on earth can they have allowed their children to disrespect them so completely and utterly?

this is all going tits-up

You could always access them anyway by using a web archive such as The way back machine

How stupid of her to deny it and then admit it. Isn't there a Max Clifford for the middle classes who can take her in hand and help her handle the media a bit better? She seems to be digging herself a deeper and deeper hole and it's uncomfortable to watch.

Well, we've once again proved the truth of 'never believe anything until it's been officially denied.'
Why didn't she just admit it to the nice man from the Torygraph?

oops
x posted

The article says they have removed the columns now that the author has been identified, to protect the childrens privacy...but there's a BOOK of the columns! So whats the frigging point of that??

Ah, I see it already has been. Oh dear.

www.amazon.co.uk/Living-Teenagers-Kids-Parents-Bumpy/dp/0755317548

Bit pointless removing them on the website then.

I see they've removed the online Living With Teenagers columms "to protect the children".

How long before the book containing all the columms is published do you reckon?

Oh dear.
I was frequently appalled by the Living With column.
I'd be mortified if I was a memeber of that family. I feel sorry for the kids too.

Guardian piece claims LWT columns have been taken down now the childrens' identities are known. But they are actually still there...

"a collection of affectionate vignettes " Snort.

Why deny it then, only yesterday she was denying it. Bet she realised she was going to be outed. She's so fucking feeble.

Well, she did write about her youngest son only having three pubes if I recall.

Why 'poor kids'?

What has she done wrong? CC before six months or something? What a Hindley!

Oh, theyoungvisiter, you are funnier than me.

But if the headlines read like that it would have required the journalist to actually show some imagination and linguistic flair!

Ummmm... I wonder if that went on Wikipedia before or after July 2008 when I first mooted my suspicions that JM was the author of LWT here on good old Mumsnet??!

Mumsnet must be a great source for lazy inquisitive journalists! Can't say as I blame them though!

Yes but the headlines will be:

So, Slow Easy - Nigel Slater gives 5 easy winter-warmers that will convert you to the joys of slow-cooking.

Home-maker or Hypocrite? Allison Pearson looks at stay at home mothers who hire cleaners and asks, if homemaker is a job, can you delegate?

and

Obesity in Our Cities - Polly Toynbee looks at the national fastfood scandal which is denying urban workers a healthy lunch.

Do you think lazy journalists just come on MN when they are stuck for a story? So tomorrow's headlines - taken from today's active convos - are:

- Woman buys slow cooker after a year of procrastinating.

- SAHM paying for Cleaner. Unreasonable?

- Burger King, Subway, Greggs and McDs - the only lunch outlets in close proximity to hungry woman.

Well, if it wasn't Julie Myerson then I am sure their mutual agent is doing the decent thing and helping one sue the other for plagiarism

Hmmm, think I'd better study those instructions on hyperlinks a bit more closely.

No that's not her.

But you are a good detective.

A quick Google finds me only one (identifiable) Pat photo on the whole internet - "here caninefilmacademy.com/NonDogDocs/Staff/PatWhite.html". But this is quite old.

Her dog training club website is "here www.hdtc.co.uk" (I should cross post this to the pets topic I think)

oh she is multi-talented then. Here is she the dog trainer in this photo?

Here is a useless, irrelevant and mostly unrelated fact - did anyone know that Pat White of Rogers, Coleridge and White is a (fantastic) dog trainer when she's not dining her celebrity client list? She runs brilliant doggie classes from a church hall in the back end of nowhere between Shepherds Bush and Acton. My dog is an alumni! And now I've got that off my chest, normal service is now resumed on this thread ...

Mumsnet is quoted in just about every randum newspaper article that I read at the moment (although Siobhan thingy from netmums seems to be on the radio a lot).

lol @0800middleclasssleaze, dittany!

We need Donal McIntyre on the case. Do you think he might take some time off from the rink to investigate?

ROFL

Oh, come on, it's gotta be one of them, hasn't it?

at dittany

You can imagine the Daily Telegraph coming over all tabloid and putting a footer at the end these stories - "Do you know the Myersons? Have you been to dinner with them? Have you every attended PTA meetings with them? Do you want to tell your side of the story? Ring us in confidence now on 0800 middleclasssleaze".

Do I get a prize if it is him?? (I thought of him first emoticon).

yes 'cos now we're thinking 'oh well if it worth you DENYING it, then it's probably your husband...'

oooooh aren't we MEANIES

Yes, it is a bit much using unfounded internet speculation as the pretext for running the story. They could have dug around a bit more, and as you say, Dittany, used 'a source close to the author' to rebut or confirm.

I don't think they should report the rumour at all. Any old rubbish can be said on the internet - then all journalists have to do is ask the person concerned for comment, they deny it, then the paper gets to report the rumour with the denial.

It's so far from being proper journalism it's unbelievable.

What they need to find instead is "an unnamed friend of the Myerson family"

Interesting thought, bagsforlife!

I think the Torygraph is cheeky naming mumsnet as the source of the rumour. It's been widely bandied about as near certainty for ages by certain people I know and those people are not (afaik) mumsnetters.

Yes, that's what I was thinking..

oh it might be Jonathan - that could be why the father is painted as calm and reasonable and the mother as useless and hysterical

Perhaps it's a hairy-handed trucker and all fiction?

Perhaps it's Jonathan Myerson...

Perhaps the real LWT's author will out themselves to save JM's reputation (throws gauntlet down).

what do you think journalists did before there was Mumsnet - did they actually have to out and (gasp) research stories?

Norty journalists picking up and reporting rumours off the internet.

LOL, youngvisiter!

There are some differing facts but you would have to weave a few in, wouldn't you?

Someone will confirm or deny pretty swiftly....

well I doubt it's the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire so that's one client down...

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

It would be a really questionable thing to do though, wouldn't it? Deny it now? Surely the truth will out?

If you find her agents website - used to be Rogers Coleridge & White, not sure if thats changed - and look on Gill Coleridge's page, there will probably be a complete client list there, and someone with 10 minutes on their hands could have a good guess at who is the LWT author if it isn't JM.

It was TheDullWitch. Maybe she also has the same agent

Wikipedia says:

"Julie Myerson is widely believed to have been the anonymous author of 'Living with Teenagers', a Guardian column that detailed the lives of a family with three teenage children. The column was stopped after friends identified one of the children and they were ridiculed at school."

Was it TheDullWitch said not? I wonder if/how she knows for certain?

...and they have the same agent

Nice plug for us though- people will come over for the gossip!

Publicly
Arse, one week into mat leave and can't spell already!

Although actually, if it was her, I imagine Jake would cheerfully dish the dirt on her now...oh, unless he's covering up for the sake of the other 2? (ie demonstrating that he has some family integrity even if she doesn't)

Love use of the term 'uncanny similarities'.

They have the same agent.

It was her.

Poor kids.

It is certainly an extraordinary coincidence that the two families are so similar.

Sounds preeeety likely to me. There aren't actually that many of us journos who would publically document our own family's lives to that extent whether anonymously or not.

lol I thought that

Who believes it? (I don't think Tim Walker does - I love the use of "uncanny")

(Although actually the claim was already in her Wikipedia page, I'm sure the rumour didn't surface here)

[[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mandrake/4962988/Julie-Myerson-and-the-extraordinary-ca se-of-the-copycat-column.html Meyerson denies authoring "Living With Teenagers" column

"There have been rumours on the MumsNet website, but she is adamant that it is not her," a spokesman for the author, pictured, tells me. "It is no more than a coincidence."

oooer!