Publish and be damned

Her son says she is 'insane'. Her husband says she's 'devastated at what she's done'. Pundits have been quick to condemn her. So was novelist Julie Myerson right to write about her son's drug use?
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The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Wednesday 11 March 2009


As the Myerson controversy is about a book, it may be best to start with the physical object itself. I have a copy. Until this week Bloomsbury had not sent many out - publication was scheduled for May - but then the controversy broke and the publisher advanced the publication date to 16 March to maximise sales and, in the words of Bloomsbury's publicist, "To allow Julie to answer her critics". Could Julie Myerson not have answered her critics anyway, with the book's publication date unchanged? Of course. But the public's attention span is fickle and two bursts of publicity for the same book, two months apart, almost impossible to organise. There is no point in publicity if the book isn't in the shops. I don't write critically. Publishing is not a subsidised industry. Ideally, a book should make money. This is how things are.

The proof copy's cover shows a photograph of a young woman walking barefoot in a petticoat across grass. It has a wistful, 19th-century atmosphere with no suggestion of drugs in modern south London. The Lost Child is the title, A True Story the subtitle. In fact, as the back cover discloses, there are two stories. In the first, Myerson is trying to reconstruct the history of a young woman, Mary Yelloly, who died at 21 in Regency England, leaving behind a pretty album of watercolours that she'd painted of domestic life. In the second, Myerson recounts her ordeal with her eldest son, a boy made so violent and wayward by drugs (skunk, mainly) that she and her husband, Jonathan, have to lock him out of their house and, eventually, change the locks. The stories run in parallel. As the author has tea with the refined descendants of the Yelloly family in Suffolk, she is remembering the endless arguments with her son that took place only weeks or days before.

Proof copies are distributed to stimulate the interest of the book trade. The blurb describes Myerson as an "extremely high-profile writer, journalist and critic", while her new book will "appeal to fans" of memoirs by women such as Joan Didion and Lorna Sage. According to Gill Coleridge, Myerson's agent (and, to declare an interest, also mine), Myerson would have preferred the book to slip quietly into the shops and the review pages, but she knew that this was unlikely. Coleridge, who is good at stiffening resolve, told her she had no option but to "stand behind the book" - that is, to publicise it wholeheartedly. She began last month with an interview in the Bookseller. The interview was picked up by last Sunday's Observer. Defending her decision to disclose the most intimate details of her troubled son's behaviour, she said, "People need to know this happens to families like ours. We were very smug, we loved having young children, and as they got older we thought we were going to be very good parents of teenagers ... This thing [drugs] just came and hit us, almost out of nowhere. When we were in our darkest, loneliest place, it would have been helpful to read a book like this." As for her son, Myerson said he was "very sweet" about the book when he read it in manuscript: "He understands you have to write what you write."

The son in question, Jake Myerson, now 20, isn't hard to find - he has a Facebook page - and the London Evening Standard found him the next day. He wasn't sweet. He said, "I did see a copy of the book and I said, 'Is there any way to stop you publishing this?' and she said, 'No', and has taken that as some sort of tacit agreement. Basically, my parents are very naive 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. They are very naive people and slightly insane. They overreacted. They are very emotional people and I refuse to have anything to do with them."

The story took off from there and, as I write, shows no signs of coming down. The Myersons believe, probably correctly, that one or more newspapers have paid money for their son's version of events; we can expect more revelations today and tomorrow. Reporters have door-stepped the whole family, sought out Jonathan Myerson's first wife, pursued Jake's younger brother and sister. Yesterday Jonathan Myerson said Julie was "devastated at what she'd done to the people we love". She had never imagined this kind of destructive attention could happen to her: "I suppose she didn't think she was famous enough to have the Daily Mail parked outside." Julie Myerson was reluctant to speak for herself, because (oh, irony!) an exclusive interview with her has been placed in the Sunday Times.

All this excitement could have been foreseen. The Myerson case exemplifies arguments about maternal duty and a teenage son's right to privacy, and that great and unfair division in the world between the writer and the written-about (with the Myersons now experiencing, justly some would say, the unfortunate condition of the second category). And perhaps it was foreseen.

The book originated when Myerson, struggling to keep her mind on the story of Yelloly, couldn't stop thinking about her son. Could she unite both stories with the themes of loss and, a Myerson trademark, the traces that "lost" human beings leave behind? Her husband advised that she give it a try.

When it was finished, she could decide whether to publish or not; whether morally, as well as aesthetically, it was the right thing to do. This isn't unusual. In my own editing experience I can think of at least two writers who adjusted or withdrew books because the intimate disclosures inside them might damage their families and friends. "No good friendship is worth risking for a paragraph," is what one of them used to say. Myerson is a far less guarded writer. Family life speeds down a well-oiled chute from the dinner table to the printing press. "I write about what I care passionately about and that happens to be my family," she has said, "and I can't think of any other way to live." But the cautionary thought seems to have occurred to her, too, because when she finished the book she met her son and asked him to read it.

What happened next is the kernel of the case. The scene is described in the book's afterword. Mother and son meet in a Peckham cafe. She tells him about his role in her book.

"He wipes a chip through his ketchup and gives me a weary look.

"So - what? My whole life story's in this fucking book?

"It's not quite like that, I say, pulling out the manuscript. But please, I really do need you to read it, tell me what you feel about it. Don't worry, it's not so much about you - or at least it is - but it's more about me really. A mother's story. And I know you're not going to like everything in it. In fact, there's quite a lot you might not like. But please, please try to remember that it's been written with nothing but love."

They meet again a day later. He has pencilled objections against a few small sections. He says that, to be honest, he wasn't "all that interested in the stuff about the Mary Yelloly person" (other readers may agree). He had, she writes in the foreword, "been more generous about it than I could ever have hoped". Later she finds some of his poems, includes them in the book and (as her husband pointed out to me) pays him for them from her advance.

You might argue from this that Jake was party to the book's publication. But at no point was his permission explicitly sought. He may well have thought, as he told the Standard, that there was no way he could stop her publishing it - a view his father admits would be shared by Jake's siblings. Jonathan Myerson thinks it a good and worthwhile book. "I understand and respect the prohibition about adults divulging the private lives of their children, but this is an emergency. The emergency is called skunk. Terrible things were happening in this house because of it. The book is about a family who love their boy very much and didn't know what to." He and his wife had tried everything: conversations with police and schoolteachers, therapy, a rehab centre. "It's so galling to be given the impression by the Daily Mail that we simply caught him with a spliff and said 'Out! Never darken our doors again.'"

In his view, getting the message out about skunk justifies the book's publication. How on earth, he said, could we get this knowledge into the public realm without writing about our children? And yet, if his son had "thrown up his hands in horror", his wife wouldn't have published it, at least under her own name.

Julie Myerson's father disowned her when she was 16, and later killed himself. She has written about this. Her behaviour towards her son is not comparable - her parents had separated and her father seemed to suspect her as her mother's ally - but the coincidence is shocking and distressing to her.

I hardly know Myerson. On the evidence of previous conversations, she seems likeable, candid and direct. The same qualities can be found in her book. The episodes with her son are incomparably better achieved than her desultory and dutiful-seeming excursions to find the facts of Yelloly's life. And how could they not be better? This isn't a novel but non-fiction. A real son is a real son, even if he is knocking you down in your own living room, while the life of a young Regency woman is simply "material". In most writers, they would occupy different parts of the brain - a novelist's mistake, probably, to try to combine them. The result undermines her husband's argument for the book as an anti-skunk gospel when its form is an artful literary memoir. "You and your short snappy sentences," says Jake when he returns his mother's manuscript. "I know what you're doing, you know."

The safest subjects for memoirs are the dead. The libel laws, the fear of hurting others, the worry that one's children at least deserve privacy if not unconditional love: only death can lift these constraints on literary art. Philip Roth called the memoir "probably the most manipulative of all literary forms": it could never be quite as frank as it pretended to be - true frankness was to be found in fiction. "With autobiography there's always another text, a counter-text, if you will, to the one presented," said the US writer.

Partly what he meant by that was that the things a writer excluded in a memoir were as interesting as those included, and also that, this being the real and not fictional world, others would have different versions of the same experience. Counter-texts often remain invisible. Jake Myerson, not being dead, offers one that has sprung inconveniently to life.

What the papers said

"Jake ... thinks his mother is nuts. According to him, she is naive, hysterical and 'slightly insane'. You know, it is hard to argue with the drift of his argument. ... [Julie is] the type of author who would recoil at the mawkish spectacle of Jade Goody selling her death for public delectation, while ... imagining her own tale to be on a higher ethical plain." Jan Moir, Daily Mail

"One can only pity her son Jake, who is just 20-years-old and whose anger and bitterness about his exposure suggest this to be an ongoing tragedy for all concerned." Liz Hunt, Daily Telegraph

"What makes Myerson's behaviour so much worse is that she's perpetuating the abuse of a young man that began when she and her husband exiled him from their lives - and doing it in public." Will Self, Evening Standard

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