"Write about what you know" may be good advice. But writing about "who" you know is something else entirely, especially if the "who" is a member of your family. Blake Morrison's mother was said to have had reservations about his memoir And When Did You Last See Your Father?. Hanif Kureishi's sister was not happy about her brother's portrait of her in The Mother, even if it was disguised as fiction. And Frank McCourt's memoir, Angela's Ashes, seems to have offended half of Limerick.
Perhaps it is no accident that memoirs about children by their parents often focus on those unable to answer back. Mothers (Rachel Cusk, Anne Enright, Kate Figes) write about their struggles with babies. Autistic children are given voice (George and Sam by Charlotte Moore) and mental illness is beyond the reach of retaliatory comment (Michael Greenberg's Hurry Down Sunshine being the most recent example). All these books have received friendly reviews. Yet no one who has even glanced at a newspaper recently will have missed the explosion of outrage against Julie Myerson for writing a memoir about her teenage son and his cannabis addiction.
For Myerson, judgment day came early - before her book had even been published. And some commentators (Alexander Chancellor in the Guardian, Minette Marrin in the Sunday Times) did not even pause to register what sort of a book she had written (describing it as a novel), let alone wait to read it. The chorus of disapproval has been extreme, shrill and personal; if Britain did a line in fatwas, Myerson would have been for it. The argument has been that she has broken the ultimate rule: she has written about her troubled young son in a way that can only damage him further. And, naturally, the critic that everyone has been listening to with most attention is Jake Myerson, the subject of the book, handsomely paid by the Daily Mail to tell his story. He has eloquently denounced his parents and claims he was opposed to publication from the start (his mother's account is different).
Writing always starts as a private act. And it is easy to see how The Lost Child evolved. Julie Myerson was meant to be working on another book about Mary Yelloly, an early 19th-century Suffolk watercolourist who died aged 21. While researching her subject, her beloved 17-year-old son, who had become hooked on cannabis, was undergoing a change of character. He had become violent (knocking his mother down, perforating her eardrum). He stole from the family, lied and - the final straw - tried to introduce her younger children to drugs. After two years of turbulence, Myerson threw him out, hoping that what the drug experts advised - tough love - would work, that he would hit rock bottom, ask for help. Meanwhile, her life and work started to merge like dyes that were not fast - they bled into one another. Her book became a way of continuing to be involved with her son. If losing him felt like bereavement, writing about him was keeping him under her roof. And perhaps, in the writing, Myerson experienced what life would not permit: the illusion of control. Writing the book was, in the most complicated sense, a maternal act.
It has three strands - an unlikely plait. First, Mary Yelloly. She was a sort of East Anglian Daisy Ashford (at eight, already a skilful watercolourist). I enjoyed the descriptions of her charming paintings: "Energetic bowls of fruit that seem to crouch ready to bound off the page." But Myerson is haunted by Yelloly in a way that the reader is not. She paces around the cemetery of Woodton church in Suffolk, looking for her subject's grave, and the emotional tone, fraught and wistful, seems to be as much about her home situation as her researches. She writes in a show-your-workings way - everything grist to her narrative mill - and repeatedly asks: "What if?" - the novelist's question. Yelloly needed a slender book to herself. Instead, marooned between fact and fiction, she is destined to continue as she began, a neglected, watery figure, upstaged by Myerson's son.
The second strand of the plait is Julie Myerson's adolescence: the breakdown of her parents' marriage and her ambivalent relationship with her father, who committed suicide on the night her daughter was born. She has touched on this material before. In spite of its drama, I was impatient to return to the third, main strand: Jake. Not that he has a name in this story. While Mary Yelloly is addressed as "you" with unearned intimacy, Jake is either "he" (the arm's-length third person) or "our boy" (the "our" painfully debatable). What big stories these small words tell. And the choice of tense is revealing too. Whatever century we are in, Myerson favours the historic present; it is as if past and future tenses were unsafe.
But her writing is never less than compelling with its lopped lyricism, like someone who has to keep catching her breath. She is at her best when writing about the worst times with her son; she does not shrink from painful memories: "As usual, he is intimidating me with his size. As usual, I feel small and sad and staccato, powerless in my green-satin high heels." There is nothing she flinches from describing - she even includes Jake's girlfriend's abortion (at which I mutinied) - but Myerson's motivation is anything but base. She could have disguised her material in a novel, but she wanted to make sense of reality, to understand the chaos that has overtaken her family. She wanted to help others, herself and her son.
While the debate about the book rages, the issue at the heart of it continues to be brushed aside, except in Jonathan Myerson's excellent defence of his wife's labours in the Guardian. Skunk, as he said, is the villain of this story. An addiction counsellor tells them: "So few people understand the true nature and seriousness of cannabis addiction. There is an awful lot of denial out there. And ignorance." For the unenlightened, the difference between cannabis and skunk is explained. "'In my opinion,' the counsellor says, 'skunk is more dangerous than heroin. Unlike heroin, you can't ever make a full recovery.'"
The book not only has three strands, it has three audiences: Myerson, her son and anyone who has suffered anything comparable. Any family for whom cannabis has been a wrecker, even if they would not dream of exposing their situation in the way Myerson has, will be grateful to her for having done so. She may have been rash, but she has also been courageous. She has tried to write honestly about a nightmarish situation and a subject that never seems to get the attention it deserves. How she and her family survive the book is not our business. But she has not been slow to put herself in the dock: "No parent rejects a child in this way without feeling they've failed in the very darkest way possible." Why not leave it to Julie Myerson to do the judging?
