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...

But this case involves publication in a book all the details about her son (although she says he consented which is obviously very material). I suspect when your child is very little you probably do have a right to put it on stage, photograph it nude and publish that to your friends, take it to nudist camps, tell your friends how many times it wet its pants etc etc but once it gets to about 12/13, has its own ideas, views then gradually just as in guidance from th einformation commission about when a school needs consent from the child or consent from the parent for various things, it comes of an age when it has the right to decide some matters itself.

Edam, interestingly enough, as you were posting I was having a conversation with my DH that went like this:

"Like Mein Kampf, I feel I should read it in all its awfulness, but I refuse to buy it. Maybe I will borrow them from the library".

"Ah but she would still get a few pence from the library loan".

Moral dilemma.

Steal a copy?

I am not a very proficient criminal. My face would give me away.

Wait two weeks and buy it s/h off Amazon/ebay?

I never really thought about it like that Xenia.
But I think the child's privacy is controlled by the parents up to 16? 18?

It's interesting though. As a reporter I always assumed that if the parents gave the nod then all was fine.

There's something tabloid-esque about Julie getting her kid to 'approve' the manuscaript so he couldn't sue her.

Do you think she had legal documents there for him to sign?

Does it mean you can write whatever you like about your children, true or false?

Tim Dowling yesterday

V funny (esp paying the kid next door)

the skunk epidemic

the way they talk about it reminds me of Cake on Brass Eye (but I know nothing about skunk apart from the Myerson propaganda )

Yup, strikes me that way too, Ponders, especially the way they say ooh, it's not like it was in our day, it's all scary and dramatic and will set you on The Road To Ruin.

I know sod-all about skunk but if I wanted to find out, don't think the Myersons would be my choice of experts.

Also reminds me of that poor girl, Leah Betts. I was in my first year of university when she died. All of us teenagers were very scornful of the moral panic and the insistence of her parents/the newspapers that there was some Evil Drug Overlord who had supplied the drug. Obviously somewhere up the chain there will have been one, but we knew perfectly well a. that she would have got it from a friend who was not trying to kill her or sell her into slavery and b. that it was drinking too much water, not one E, that killed the poor child.

It was moral panic about drugs that did for her - if she hadn't been so terrified of tabloid stories about dehydration, she wouldn't have guzzled so much water.

Yes, that was vile too, dandylioness

Been pondering as to why the reviews coming out have been so unsatisfying. And find I'm back here on the support thread, still pondering ... .

Basically, I feel like a passenger on a train, emotions all wrung out of me, but essentially passive and impotent; which jarrs oddly with the huge emotional ... mugging ... I seem to have experienced.

All the reviews seem to say "Oi! Stop judging! How dare you ask questions! How dare you splodge your emotions all over the place!" Which is slightly at odds with the feeling that i had my emotions/judgments actually removed under duress and something shoved at me, and my "opinion" extracted rather forcibly.

So I reckon those reviewers aren't helping me, as a passenger on the train, as a sheep-who-is-happy-to-be-a-sheep really find a vocabulary/expression for the whole sorry experience.

I wish they'd dealt more with what is at stake if a writer moves into the area of "faction"; all the issues of power and truth and judgment and so on.

Interestingly, Julie Myerson has said she wrote "Out of Breath" from the same experience. Which, of course, means she fishes the same waters, again and again (we knew that). But it's interesting that "fiction" just doesn't raise quite the same issues. Maybe why she just didn't think that there was going to be a problem with the new book. She'd nevr encountered that response before.

here

The reviews of the book will be unsatisfactory because we haven't been judging her book, but have been judging her parenting. Is that it?

Hmmm. But I tend to see that as part of the thing about the move to "faction". It ceases to be operating within the genre of "Literature", which has it's own peculiar games of judgement. It moves instead into the space of "the Real"; and the games it plays with that particular structure should be explored.
As "faction" it also, for good or ill, moves into this whole genre of "authenticity" literature (misery memoir/celebrity culture/reality TV, whatever). And there it has a function as a "truth-claim".
So to judge it as just "Literature" is to apply an out-of-date, mid-twentieth century literary/critical technique to what is, essentially, emerging as the early twenty-first century' dominant cultural form.
So as a "truth-claim", with it's claim to the "Real" and to public space, it pulls judgements, on the "real" "truth" of the issues it itself claims "reality" from, from us; who just don't "know".
So maybe the extra-literary "judgement" is actually a (not very pleasant) part of the process.
I think.
It's a sobering thought that this form is what critics/historians of the future will judge us by, isn't it?

All the reviewers have a common thread saying 'put aside what you have read in the papers, blah, blah, blah' and it is the story of Mother Courage etc etc, but I just CAN'T separate the two things.

All the interviews and publicity IS going to colour my opinion. Knowing that there are two conflicting 'stories' about what happened in the fall out with her family just makes the whole book somehow difficult to accept as a piece of 'faction' or whatever the genre is. Now we know her son is at odds with the version being told, whether or not he is telling the truth, it just makes the book into something else. I am not explaining it very well, but just makes for uncomfortable reading, I suppose, however well written (and I am sure it is as she is an accomplished writer).

There was an excerpt of it in the Observer review, about the son hitting her and she writes something along the lines of 'he towered above me, me only 5' 3" in my green satin heels' and it immediately made me think, why does she have to mention what she was wearing???? I don't think I would have particularly thought that if there hadn't been all the press interviews from her son, saying it's all about her, not him.

Yes.
And the fact it's real, and ongoing.
Urgh! I feel emotionally worn out.
And disgruntled. [selfish emoticon]

Unfortunately I haven't read any JM books before, or this one so I am not sure it is even fits in the space of literature. It is being written about over and over again because she is a middle class mother inviting us to speculate about her family drama.

Ok so I see that we don't have a way to negotiate and talk about this type of writing within literary criticism (if we accept it is worth talking about, minus the family drama) so need a new set of criteria. Going back to when critics decided that the unreal might become the new 'authentic' then yes we've reached that stage - loads and loads of people are happy to accept the unreal as more authentic than their next door neighbour's problems. So it's pretty much accepted. I'd love to be tackling how to deal with this stuff... hmm let me think I'm a bit fuzzy after 3 glasses of light red wine.

It does need to be attacked with a bit more bite I feel, not just allowed and accepted as a new norm.

justabout - I'm not sure I do.

And certainly don't understand why I am still being sucked in!!
Must resist.

And perhaps we need new ways to tackle this type of emotionally manipulative writing - something which accknowledges that the audience may be loosing something of their own by constantly being bombarded.

(don't go Cherryblossoms!, don't resist, this is great stuff, literary criticism + mc parenting)

It's been ages since I had to do any lit crit - not since university, tbh - so am v. impressed by all these clever posts. (I studied post-modernism in some depth but have forgotten everything bar Barthes being killed by a milk float or ice cream van or whatever.)

Are there any guidelines we can draw on from criticism of autobiography? I know this is more complicated because her son is answering back, but wondering if there might be a starting point

oh, post-modernists would argue pretty much anything IIRC!

and what does 'text' mean anyway? A straightjacket imposed on our thinking by dead white men (funny how many post-modernists are dead/middle-aged white men...)