Julie Myerson - why am I not surprised that a book has materialised concerning her own son's drug issues?

[glasjam]

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...

You know how she kept saying 'perhaps I was naive' in the Newsnight interview? It's quite a hard thing to believe in a 43 y-o woman, but I think perhaps she is. Naive and a bit girlish and just not very grown-up in her thinking. That's quite sad, and then it's quite sad to have us all picking over the shambolic state of her family and home and parenting as a result of this seemingly arrested development.

LOL. True. I thought it was an account of PND actually, which she thought must just be how it is for everyone, but only she had the wit and articulacy to write it down and was brave enough to 'expose' it.

Both of them very 'sensitive', very thin-skinned.

Isn't that the point of LWT and Rachel Cusk though. So bad and self-absorbed you want to slap them, and also makes you realise in smug fashion how very much you have got right in your life by comparison.

I believed the naive for a bit.... but after Newsnight, the breafast TV sofas, the exclusive interviews and articles.... me no believe.

Apparently (i.e. I read it in the Mail) they are rushing through a second printing because they expecting the demand to be so high

100 I'd agree with you if it'd just been a really badly thought out book, just the one. And she was all shocked about how it's been received, and gathered up her family and had a big think.

But the fact that it's a column, and two books, and about 475 interviews, with her and her dh and two of her sons being interviewed - she's hardly been out of the guardian for weeks, which does really invite picking over doesn't it? You can't go on and on and on about it in the press and expect everyone to politely turn the other cheek and put it down to being a bit naive.

she has invited the nation to this though, she wrote a book, she will for sure cash in.

Later this spring half of us may see the book and know it sounds familiar, we may not quite pinpoint why, but we know we have heard about it, and kerching!

Even this thread is part of securing her future financial gain. That is why, should she read this, she will just have to suck up the comments and think of a luxury spa break in the Grenadines. I am sure it will go a long way to alleviate all the stresses this is potentially putting her through...

I'll tell you what though

How GUTTED would you be if you were a Guardian-reading leftie and your son sold his story to THE MAIL??????

talk about revenge

But it's not harsh. Like Cusk, and many other woemn every year, I was a freelancer looking for childcare. So I checked out the options. I made phone calls. I researched the NCMA and its local groups. I found someone, a fabulous childminder. Along the way I dealt with some wallies at the said early years service.

I was as it happens very worried, because unlike Cusk my writing, such as it is, provided the bulk of our household income at the time. But what I didn't do was waft around wringing my fragile paws at this unique situation.

But I don't think she anticipated this. The Bookseller interview was picked up by the press - it ran away from them. Then she will have been told to stand by the book, fight her corner, get publicity, be steely, see it through.

And in fairness, the columns and that book WERE supposed to be anonymous.

Ah but I LIKE Cusk

Reading Cusk and Wolf prepared me well for the first year with a baby

I basically prepared for nuclear fallout and was most cheered when it didn't happen

they were part of the anti-baby-bliss movement, really, for which I am thankful

Dont shoot me. But, we write about our families and children justabout daily, on a public forum. Only difference, we dont get paid, and we are reasonably anonymous.

they were rubbish at being anonymous though weren't they? their kids were identified at their own school at the time.

I can't believe she kept their ages, gender, location and parents jobs THE SAME

Well Cusk wandered around, did a little bit of fragile paw shaking, and then used those paws to write a book, pretty sharpish. So not so floaty in fact.

But generally QS, we write for support and advice to peers

Whereas JM wrote to GIVE support and advice to readers

COMPLETELY different imo

Her choice to do that. Her choice to do all the interviews - it's HER family, the publicist doesn't own them, she doesn't own them, she can't keep running with this and the picking apart just stop.

And if the columns were supposed to be anonymous, but aren't anymore, then why still put out the book? That's not naive is it, she knows the response now, and the impact on her children.

but she's a journalist, she knows how it works, she can hardly plead 'I didn't realise...'. She could have turned Newsnight down.

And the columns weren't that anonymous if all 'Jack's' friends worked it out.

Yes, QS. We are all going to get in the neck BIG TIME though when our dc are 14, and find out our posting names and then Do A Search.

How can you tell TOTAL STRANGERS all that about me?

It'll be bad, believe me. MN will come back and bite us all on the arse.

This is such an interesting thread. I'd not looked at it before, because I hadn't heard of this damn woman until the last few days.

It is inexplicably awful behaviour on her part. I had a really awful, draining scene with my 13 year old the other day. He was so vile, but so conspicuously vulnerable. The very notion of publicising that kind of intimate and sensitive struggle is horrendous.

And I can't imagine that 'the emergency that is skunk' is well served by a an arty twining with the memoir of a long-dead artist.

This woman is Jade Goody on stilts. It's worse than a camera crew in a hospice. And at least Jade was not hypocritical about it.

Soem of the posters who objected to the MN cooing over Jade were told their reaction was a middle-class snobbery. But the middle class can eat its own entrails just as lustily.

Yes, you're both right. I'm not sure why I'm defending her really. I sort of do think it's a massive hash up, and I haven't read her book either. I've read an extract. I wonder whether it wasn't supposed to be a drug busting expose of her son? And that has become the spin, because it's the best line of defence. When everyone reads it, they'll all be skipping through the pages of the edwardian girl and her watercolours. for sure.

When I was googling this story a few days ago I also found some details of the Radio 4 adaptation of "Everyone who lived in our house", in which her children actually played themselves. I can't explain why i found that odd, but I did.

She doesn't seem to have drawn much of a line between her children's private lives and her work.

Ah bother.
Unlike (seemingly everyone else) I adored LwT.
When people said that the teenage years are replays of the toddler stage, it was described perfectly in LwT. The hassles, the juggles, the rudeness, the battles, all of it that I could easily imagine in my future.
I don't judge when fairly average parents have these outcomes, instead I take the "There but for the grace of God go I" attitude.

But the fact JM could write LwT with affection while keeping back things that were blowing up so badly that she then went onto write The Lost Child about how bad it really was, I must admit, I don't get that at all.
Poo.

v true thready

The whole situation is truly offal.

lol Boco

I liked LWT too. I have outed myself as a LWT reader llkj.