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...

good lord

how could she (and her husband) have though this was ok?

They were sniggering about it on the Today Programme, too.
Very British reactions (the sniggering AND tut-tutting at the laundry-airing in the first place).

I ADORED Living with Teenagers, I used to buy the Guardian just to read it.
Some of the bare facts of the Jake's dance with drugs doesn't fit with things that the LwT writer has said.

It would depress me if it were true that LwT writer and JM were same person.
Mind, I have siblings with terrible drug problems, writing is therapeutic, I can understand dealing with it as JM has done.

Mail article is very depressing. Notice they've taken out all the reader comments at the end. Wonder if they were all condemning Myerson?

Dittany, I completely agree. This situation does strike me as one where a therapeutic approach would have been much more productive than a public laundry-airing.

Always sad to see a destructive cycle repeating needlessly.

There's an excerpt from the actual book in the Telegraph too.

Had to laugh at the Mail who just had to bring in 'Nu-Labour' as though THAT's the reason for it all.

I would think the majority of the Mail readers are all for the throwing out, rather than the other way round.

Personally, I think JM and her husband ought to take a good long look at their behaviour in all this rather than their child's, and he was a CHILD when all this started. Children do not turn overnight into a drug addled teen without something troubling them.

I haven't read the article yet (although I do have the Guardian on at Saturday) and will. My gut instinct is that it is really easy to judge if you haven't been there. I have a dd who having been an angelic child unravelled between 14 & 15 (following big life changing events beyond our control) and I spent several years dealing with & endeavouring to support her & get her help whilst trying to protect my son and endeavouring to keep the family together & functioning, whilst trying to make a living and deal with a marriage break up. It felt like everyone had/has an opinion on how life got to that point, who was to blame and what I should and shouldn't have done to deal with dd's behaviour. I will probably read this book because although we have come out the otherside of it all, whilst in the mist of it I was desperate to know I was not the only parent dealing with such things. And quite frankly I imagine writing about it is rather cathartic & helps make sense of things. I feel like my dd, my ds and myself have been through hell in the last few years and I thought about how much more I could take and when would enough be enough, especially in terms of trying to protect ds. Maybe I will come back to this thread when I've read the book.

I've not really followed this story but just read this in torygraph and its interesting toread on here some other perspectives on the mother.

The thing is, there is a weird demand for 'authenticity' in writing these days which leads to fuckups like this. If you want to respect the privacy of family in friends and fictionalise what you think is an important story, then some bastard will always dig out your real identity and blow it all over the tabloids. Look at the market for those horrendous misery memoirs: quite a few of them appear to be made up and it would have made more sense to publish them as novels - yet I suppose that would mean that the fuckwits who devour them would have to admit to themselves that they are just getting off on more and more detailed descriptions of other peope's suffering.

I can understand getting to the point where you have no option but to tell your child he can't live at home any longer. What I think is utterly wrong is to publicise your family problems all over the national media for profit (yes I know it's therapeutic and might help other families, yadda yadda, but in the end you publish books to make money). That's the kind of thing that rips families apart even when the issues are 50 years old and stone cold dead. To do it while the problems are clearly still live and ongoing is grossly stupid.

And also a very unwise use of power -- effectively she's saying to her son, "I'm a published author, I can shout much more loudly than you can, so my version of the story is the one that stands." How could anybody, however innocuous your family story, not mind someone else writing and publishing their story?

Daft, deluded and completely self-absorbed.

Surprise surprise, both mother and son try to justify themselves.

I don't know where the truth is, somewhere in between presumably. But I do suspect her writing about it as fact, not fiction, probably doesn't help her son.

I am so thick. Never clocked she was the LWT writer, of course she is .

She's always written about that poor lad - his crush on the family dog (!), his first day at school (oh my poor little lad stumbling off, etc etc, pass the sick bag).

And it has repeatedly struck me, reading about her treatment of her son; I used to run the communications at one of the big charities dealing with homeless young people. Most had been thrown out of, rather than running away from, home. With no chance to return, to mess up (and I know he's messed up badly and other people have been very hurt) and/or get a second chance. But their parents tended not to be middle-class self-justifiers .

For anyone who still doubts that JM wrote living with teenagers, compare and contrast:

www.independent.co.uk/travel/europe/amsterdam-julie-myerson-goes-it-alone-with-h er-son-raphael-512318.html

www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2006/nov/04/familyandrelationsh ips.family3

(A LWT column selected at random.)

I've just read that Torygraph extract and
(a) she's definitely LWT author
(b) she was VILE to that girl her son made pregnant.

Wasn't she just. Poor kid.

JM is so woe is me ooh, we've got rid of my embryonic grandson - barely recognises it might have been ever-so-slightly traumatic for the poor girl.

(c) it is misery porn of the worst order

Just read the Telegraph piece and, never given it much thought before, but, yes, she is definitely LWT mother (and found the whole pregnancy episode horrific).

The one thing in her favour is that the extract was very powerfully written and compelling - but then it's great source material, I suppose. I'm not sure I condemn her out of hand for writing about Jake but it does make me feel uneasy. I feel sad for them all, it's a horrible and apparently irretrievable mess for everyone.

Notice how her husband resents their son being paid by newspapers for his side of the story? Hoist with their own petard.

"Their beloved son was falling further and further into the world of drugs - smoking the addictive and powerful form of cannabis known on the street as "skunk""

his response

"Basically, my parents are very naïve and got caught up in the whole US anti-drugs thing. There is a very big difference between smoking a spliff and being a drug addict," he told the London Evening Standard."

I think perhaps he is immature but an addict, no!

I think he must have had quite serious drug issues for his parents to take the line they did - after all, they are pretty much prototype liberal lefties who, according to Jake in the Mail article, more or less expected their children to smoke weed etc. The paragraph about his refusing to get up even though the removal men wanted to move his bed sounded a bit dodgy. Whether he was an addict or not is (a) difficult to quantify (b)almost beside the point since, as far as they were concerned, his behaviour was unacceptable and he would not change it to accommodate the rest of the family.

Yes, I agree with lalalonglegs. I think he does have a problem. I am sure he became utterly obnoxious and horrible but the problem with some 'liberal lefties'(not my phrase) is that they do encourage their teens to 'experiment' etc at too young an age i.e 13/14 (usually projecting their lost youth on to them) but then they don't like it when it goes too far, as it obviously has done with Jake Myerson. And then they throw him out. Not very liberal at all.