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...

She apparently took drugs for a start.

Secondly he says although they did show him the manuscript he then went to take legal advice (presumably that can be proved one way or the other) and was advised there wasn't much he could do but he made her take out the untruth (in his view) that he had sold drugs to his sibling. She says they made changes to keep him happy and gave him a small fee for his consent. He says that he sold drugs to a sibling was one of her fantasies.

She also sounds ghastly, loathsome and hideous. I feel sorry for her been so self absorbed and feel soory for all the kids having to have her as a mother.

FOr someone who is supposedly itelligent she does a very good job at coming across as a right dim fuckwit.

I think she would have preferred it if they'd stayed small & sweet & biddable instead of growing up & turning into people with minds of their own.

"The trouble with making babies is it turns you into a deluded fantasist. From the ecstatic seriousness of those first birth classes, through to those first steps, and the day those baby teeth come through, you are seduced into believing that life can, after all, be perfect. That it might just be possible to create a delectably unblemished person if you just throw enough love, passion, energy and time at them. And then teenagers come along to prove that whatever you do, it's not, you can't, you won't, it's out of your hands, mate."

Maybe she overdid the love, passion, energy & time & shortchanged them on respect.

They are very interesting issues. My mother was happy when we were under 10 but found teenagers very difficult and I've tried (not saying I've succeeded) to do it better. If you feel your children are something you control ( see the thread www.mumsnet.com/Talk/education/716638-What-academic-expectations-if-any-do-you-have-for-your ) it's very hard to cope with them being different from what you envisage as they become teenagers.

I am sure she can cope with the publicity and it does sound like if some of the events are true - son outside at 3am with hi fi on disturbing neighbours that that was very hard but I can't really get a feel for the truth of it. I used to let my teenage son have all his school friends round here for a night at 15 and 16 and I was pleased although it was noisy and they were up all night and they drank. I wanted them to be somewhere where they were safe and I was I impressed by their care of each other including when one was sick from the drink. I also liked how they were young and old, the contrast, and some hiding the drink they didn't finish because they didnt' really like the taste. Yes, having to put in ear plugs to get a night's sleep wasn't that much fun adn of course one worried about them but I think they were grateful for my tolerance. Even writing that I suppose on an anonymous basis arguably breaches their privacy rights but for me it's the right side of the line.

I saw Ms Myerson's latest article - in Saturday's Telegraph and thought it was appalling. Surely the time to write about these problems is later, when, hopefully, they have been resolved. What would be interesting and helpful for other parents is something written by the parents and the child after the problem has been resolved - not some money making alienating work such as she has written. Being a teenager is hard, being a teenager with a writer mother exploiting that child's problems must be intolerable.

I agree with Xenia's posts.

The key thing for me is the quote that Ponders uses in her post. When we embark on parenthood, we are peddled this myth, that life can be perfect. It seems to me that JM and her partner's biggest mistake was to fall for the myth, to try to create a perfect idyll, which was then certain to collapse at some point.

Not that she should be vilified for that. I think it's extremely difficult to not be seduced into thinking that way. Look at the industry that has built up around having a baby - just walk into a baby/toddler goods shop or go on line. Watch the adverts on tv. Babies and young children are sweet, biddable and above all, marketable. Once kids hit puberty, they aren't. They are spotty, smelly, rude and stroppy.

In the vast majority of cases, they will come through it unscathed as Xenia points out. But it would be a whole lot easier if society was less judgmental and if teenagers were valued as much as tiny cute babies.

The key thing for me is that she's effectively wrecked, I think, her relationship with her son.

I recently wrote a deeply personal piece for a mainstream magazine. I was asked to mention some other members of my family in it, and refused because I really don't want to put my sister on the line in public. And downplayed various things to do with my parents, because although we still have a very difficult relationship, I don't madly want to to castigate a couple of people in their 70s, in print.

The only things I've written about my kids have been sentimental and glowing .

We all make our own judgments about what we say about our children in print. I don't even like hearing women slagging off their husbands in public when they get together. It's disloyal and nasty although I can see that some of it regard it as therapeutic to do so. But what is done must be within the law. If he did agree here to the publication having taken his own legal advice, then that's done and legally he won't have any come back, although morally he might.

The idea that children will be perfect is a consumerist myth really. Obviously people like me are lucky to be able to buy good schools and the like but that isn't a solution to being able to make children what you want them to be. In fact I don't want mine to be particular things although it's easier to say to people you know for whom it matters that the child is doing something which those people you mix with and are related to would expect and is "successful2 in their terms. I remember defending my sister dropping out at one point (after she'd graduated thankfully) with the argument to my parents that isn't going to work 9/5 as much a cult, something you are conditioned to as being in a cult or whatever. Not that they weren't ultimately supportive but they were disappointed. In fact my father's advice when we were teenagers (and he wa a rather wise psychiatrist) was to pick work you enjoy and he relished working full time until he was 77. 25 years into my own work I enjoy it as much as when I started, more so and I hope in 25 years' time that is still so. I would like my children to find the same satisfaction in life and work. But ultimately what matters is your brain chemistry, your capacity for happiness, your avoidance of depression.

"in what is really only a holding pattern you maintain for a few years after which they emerge great." Xenia, I think that may be a phrase I'll try to keep in my head when dd hits the teenage years - very sound thinking!

Wow - the Sunday papers are full of it. My Yahoo even had it as a headline FFS. This sounds cynical I know but the publicity for this forthcoming book is priceless. I wonder how long it is before she's on the This Morning sofa?

Yes, a pilot holding before landing trying to keep the child on track even if not progressing until the hormones calm down. All teenagers aren't as bad as others of course.

I assumed he went to a private school as his father is a barrister etc but he didn't. If he had would he have dropped out been in with the wrong crowd etc? Did they fail him by not paying for his education when perhaps they could afford to?

Gosh Xenia, after your last few insightful posts, that's a bit of an assumption to make!!

I totally do not agree that a parent who can afford private education is 'failing' their child if they choose not to take that route. Life is far more complex! I could afford to pay private for mine, but actually don't for all of them.

I thought the article mentioned how he got in with the 'rich Kensington crowd' anyway, and they were leading him astray - it's very naive to believe that private school kids don't do drugs!

It's absolutely impossible to ever say that a particular decision has led to (or not led to) a specific outcome. You could equally well ask the question if he had been to a fee paying school - it's pointless. Life is many shades of grey, not black and white. The chances are there are many factors that led to this situation - brain chemistry, personality, all the nuances of life that make people who they are.

That's a ludicrous assumption for a sensible woman Xenia - I was privately educated and two of my classmates died of heroin overdoses and I was smoking cannabis by the time I was 14.

You all complain as though the children had no benefit from JM writing about them; but they did. Her income paid for all sorts of nice things (like the mortgage). Could she have earnt the same income for the same amount of effort writing about other things (or working in other ways)? I doubt it.

Jake sounds completely in denial about the impact of his drug habit.

Er...she's a journalist. And a much more successful one than I am. And a novelist. I still stand by the argument that she has a wealth of other material at her disposal, not just tripe about how much her son was besotted with the family dog (an account to get any right-thinking teenager skinning up when recalling it a few years later).

Gosh this is a very interesting thread

I agree that the author has made a ghastly error of judgement. Most of us do dumb immature things while we are young and probably go through phases where our parents would happily tar us with a brush of "drug-addict" or "slut" or "crazy" ... but you grow up, and it's private, and you learn. Where does her SON go now?

It was awfully naive of Myerson IMO. I feel sorry for all of them, but most of all her son.

DH and I have both managed to make perfectly good livings out of journalism without cashing in on our children. I think JM might have managed it too.
LOL at Xenia and the private school protective effect. It is widely acknowledged in my area that the private schools are the ones with the drug problems.

Lol at Xenia. Amongst my friends who could afford to send their children to private school, the number one reason for prevarication is fear of the drugs issue.

(fwiw I believe drugs to be so easily available to any teenager these days that choice of school is immaterial from that particular pov)

And crossed posts with LGP

I think lots of people write about their children in a way that is FINE - and in a way that shows how incredibly FOND of their children they are. I'm thinking about people like Phil Hogan / Jon Ronson even Tim Dowling. (NB I obviously only read the Saturday Guardian) Their writing is sort of sweet and humourous and FOND. So I don't think it's wrong per se to write about your children, to an extent. But Myerson's writing always seemed to paint her children as inherently unlovable people who were hell-bent on destroying her.

You'd have thought that her experience would be great for helping her fiction writing; exploring emotions and relationships and that sort of thing... but not just this crude regurgitation of things! ARGH!

She also has managed to write several novels so it's not like she's entirely incapable of using her imagination.