THERE'S nothing better than watching someone else's kids misbehave and bestselling novelist Julie Myerson and her son Jake have been doing a great job in airing their dirty linen for our entertainment this week.
THERE'S nothing better than watchin
g someone else's kids misbehave and bestselling novelist Julie Myerson and her son Jake have been doing a great job in airing their dirty linen for our entertainment this week.
As a mother who writes a weekly column (in The Scotsman) about her inability to parent, I never submit anything my kids haven't vetted. My eldest child says write what you want as long as it's funny, my middle child says write what you want as no one reads it anyway and my youngest will no doubt be furious should she ever see the columns when she's old enough. (At the moment she just wonders why my byline picture can't be made prettier.) But the point is, when they've asked me to pull things I have, such as the time one caused the NMS of Scotland to be evacuated. Six months later he was happy for me to file it as long as he received a cut of my fee. The point is, I asked them and I have their confidence. Myerson very publicly doesn't. In that respect alone, The Lost Child is a betrayal of trust.
Reading The Lost Child your sympathies shift between mother and son. Jake is 17, not yet legally an adult, he lies in his scratcher all day, grunting and festering, allegedly steals money and gives his younger brother dope. He also hits his mother. Did he deserve to be kicked out? Probably. Did he deserve to have a book written about his addiction? Maybe. Plenty of others have done it. Surely it depends how you do it. However, the Myersons themselves had doubts. According to his father Jonathan: "We have broken one of the most serious prohibitions facing any writer: you do not write about your children." If that's what his parents think, why did they do it?
Why did his mother write an anonymous weekly column about her children and then deny it when Jake asked if it was about them. "Having grown up with this, being written about in an arbitrary way since the age of two, I have always said to my parents, 'Please don't do this, I hate this.'" If he did say that, why not respect it?
The book itself is a good read. Myerson is a skilled writer and it's touching, absorbing, honest and carefully crafted. However, there's a serious imbalance in that the Jake story totally eclipses the rest of the book. That could be the fault of the current media furore and the fact that Jake is currently rivalling Amy Winehouse in the number of times they're papped careering about the streets of London in a state of undress, but I think it's more the fault of a flaw in the book. It has a split personality. There is the story of Jake and his skunk addiction while, running concurrently alongside, is the tale of her research into Mary Yelloly, a 21-year-old whose family archive has found its way to Myerson. She tells us this was the book she was going to write, but her daily struggles with Jake crept in, much as the curly-headed dopehead sneaks back into his parent's house for a kip and to raid the fridge after they've thrown him out. Inconvenient and unpleasant he squats on the page, demanding attention, his story as raw and vivid as an adolescent pustule, while the delicate Regency tale of Mary back in 1830s Norfolk is muddled and confusing, as dusty and faded as an old manuscript.
It's all beautifully written but there is way too much detail of the 19th-century characters and their tortuous, boring family trees. While Myerson is losing herself in her historical rural hideaway, blethering on about great-granny Fanny and the silver coffee pots and buns in the drawing room at Woodton Hall, back in the 21st century her son is smashing a tea-set he'd once bought her on to the pavement in a bid to get her attention. You want to say, look what's happening under your nose woman, and deal with it.
You do want to sympathise with Myerson as well as her son, God knows children can be difficult, but she does make it hard. There's the power dynamic for a start. She bleats on about how her son always intimidates her with his size – he's more than six feet tall – and that she feels small and powerless. But as a successful writer with seven novels, two non-fiction books, a Radio 4 adaptation and homes in London and Suffolk (as well as a flat where she writes), she's living proof that the pen is mightier than the sword.
Also, in what is billed as "A True Story", she reserves the right to edit her life, to be vague, to her own advantage. Much is made of the incident when Jake hits her. He has admitted he did this and that it's "one of the most shameful moments of my life. I was holding the keys and she was slapping me in the face and I said, 'Mum will you stop slapping me please'. She slapped me eight or nine times before I finally lost it and lashed out," he has said. Compare this with his mother's account in the book. "In the muddled dark of my memory… I am definitely shouting and almost certainly swearing, but do I hit him? No, I do not hit him. That's important because later he will insist that I did... But did I hit him? Might I have hit him? Sometimes, later, late at night, months and months after this moment I will be wondering if I did."
Surely you know if you've hit your child? It might have been better to clarify this before rushing into print.
Jake will have the last word. He's young, spoilt, muddled and needy and still pretty much a child, however huge. He says: "I never wanted to get into a war of words with my parents. It has become ugly and petty, but they have broken promises never to talk about me to the press. They are writers, they are published, they have a voice. I don't."
Well, he has a voice now. And no doubt a book deal for his debut novel too. Or a volume of his poems that are dotted throughout the book. Will his novel be on the subject of betrayal perhaps? And will he be asking mum if she's happy with the manuscript? v
