MEMOIR: The Lost Child: A True Story By Julie MyersonBloomsbury, 293pp. £17.99
IN 2008, AMERICAN writer David Sheff published a candid and intelligent memoir called Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction. The book had grown out of a piece Sheff had written about his son Nic – then 22 and in the first of several rehabs – for the New York Times Magazine. The piece had met with an overwhelmingly positive response, and had prompted publisher Atheneum to ask Nic to write his own story of his addiction to crystal meth. Despite relapsing while writing it, Nic finished Tweak, and the book was published concurrently with Beautiful Boy. Both have been bestsellers. The media love the Sheffs. Nic has now been clean for more than two years.
The picture has been less pretty for the Myersons. In early March, before novelist Julie Myerson's memoir The Lost Child– about her son Jake's addiction to the potent form of cannabis known as skunk – even went on sale, the London media was in a frenzy. After an interview Myerson had given was picked up by the Observerand an extract of the book ran in the Telegraph,the Evening Standardfound 20-year-old Jake through Facebook. Jake soon gave his less-than-happy side of the story to the Daily Mail.
The Lost Childtells two stories – one of Jake and the other of Mary Yelloly, a girl who produced exquisite watercolours and died in 1838 at the age of 21. Myerson was writing about this girl's life when she became consumed by the unfolding crisis in her own home. Despite the parallel she attempts to draw between the narratives, the two don't quite weave, nor does Mary Yelloly's story sustain our interest. In a book of its own, given the writer's full attention, it could well, but alongside what's happening in Myerson's living room, it is simply too abstract.
What is happening is that Jake, once a bright, sweet young man, is undergoing a personality change, precipitated, his parents believe, by his heavy use of skunk. (In skunk, the active ingredient THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, of cannabis has been significantly increased. Skunk has been linked in studies to psychotic episodes, and there is serious concern about its effects on the still-developing brains of adolescents.) He lies to them, steals their money, refuses to attend school and gives his 13-year-old brother drugs. (A point he raises when he reads his mother’s manuscript: “I never gave him skunk. Hash, yes. Big difference.”) He also becomes verbally abusive and violent, one night hitting his mother so hard he perforates her eardrum.
After two years of bargaining, begging and trying simply to talk, the Myersons kick their 17-year-old son out of the house. Myerson’s own father had abruptly cut her out of his life when she was 17. Here, the parallel is clear, and Myerson is horrified by it.
Jake, who writes songs and busks and has overnight became a tabloid fixture, disputes much of the above. He says that though his drug use is “frequent and enjoyable”, he is not a drug addict. He labels his mother “naive” and “insane” and his own behaviour that of a “confused teenager”. Any violence, he insists, was “50/50 all the way”.
Fuelling the controversy is Myerson's recent admission that she was the anonymous author of the Guardian'spopular 'Living With Teenagers' column, a weekly chronicle of her home life, and of the book of the same name. Although she used pseudonyms for her children, classmates of her youngest son guessed his identity. The column ended last June. The Guardianhas since removed it from its website archive "to protect privacy".
Even Myerson seems to have realised that this was a dubious undertaking, saying that she had always known that as soon as her kids found out, she would stop writing the column. That’s bizarre logic, given the often highly personal details she was revealing about them, given that even if she stopped, all those intimacies would still be out there. Jake has said that on several occasions during its run, his mother denied to him that she was the author of the column.
Myerson has written two previous works of non-fiction and five novels. Something Might Happenwas long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2003. The Lost Childlooks set to do well. Bloomsbury brought its publication forward from May, and ordered a second printing of the hardback before the first had hit the shops. But almost every commentator in the UK has denounced Myerson for publishing it – sometimes with thoughtful discomfort, often with snide stupidity. Interestingly, a large portion of the online postings that follow these condemnations voice support for Myerson.
AT ISSUE IS whether Jake gave his permission for the book – and, even if he did, whether a parent should ever write about a child. Bear in mind that, though the press tend to refer to Myerson exploiting her “child”, Jake is now 20, old enough to have hatched a plan in early March, according to his mother, “to talk to the tabloids and get as much money as possible” – not the worst plan, one might say, for a young man with no job and no third-level education who enjoys taking drugs frequently.
Both Myerson and her partner, Jonathan, (a screenwriter and magistrate) insist that they would never have published The Lost Childwithout their son's agreement. Myerson describes in the book the scene in which she and Jake discuss the manuscript. While he is not exactly over the moon, neither does he explicitly withhold permission. He even agrees to let her include several of his poems. When she explains to him that she had to write this book, that it was the only thing she could write, he says: "I know that . . . I understand about writing."
He then adds that he’s been “very merciful”, and says: “So don’t you go thinking I approve of what you’ve done.” And then, Myerson writes: “I steal a glance at his face, which, despite his words, is warm, amused, even.”
Much seems to hinge on her interpretation of his look as warm and amused.
Jake says his mother would’ve published with or without his approval, and claims he consulted a lawyer who told him there was nothing he could do. As for the poetry, he makes the odd disclaimer: “I remember getting a call saying she’d pay me £1,000 if she could use it. Of course I took it, but that doesn’t mean I want it to be published.”
The nasty tit-for-tat certainly accounts for much of the vitriol that has greeted The Lost Child– so unlike the reception of Beautiful Boy,which covered the same terrain. But it doesn't account for all. Myerson is being accused of violating the sacredness of the mother/child relationship. One Sunday Timescolumnist (wrongly referring to the book as a novel) declares: "For a woman to cast out her adolescent son and then to write a novel about it . . . is a betrayal not just of love and intimacy, but also of motherhood itself." There are probably cultural differences at work, too. What we in the US call getting it out there, talking about it, the British, or at least the tabloids, see as "the biggest public display of dirty laundry since washday on the River Ganges".
Myerson and her husband say their over-riding motive is to raise awareness about the "emergency" of skunk. Their hope that the book may help other parents has caused commentators to screech in horror: the arrogance of this pair! But the Myersons themselves were essentially ignorant about skunk, and drug abuse in general, until they started meeting other parents in the same boat. And, as Jonathan points out, skunk is affecting children as young as 13 and 14, so if anyone is going to get a discussion going, it will have to be parents.
ONE OF MYERSON'S few defenders has been writer Alexander Linklater, who said in the Observer: "[Jake] is not a voiceless character in his mother's literary fantasy. He is his own actor, with his own volition, capable of landing his own punches and operating according to the same negotiations of print and payment." Indeed. His mother has said she thinks Jake should write his version of events.
Nic Sheff might agree. Tweakhas turned him into something of a pin-up. Gorgeous young women post their pictures on his MySpace page; they tell him how much they "luv" him and how his book has changed their life. He is the Lance Armstrong of the meth generation. But he and his father take their message seriously. In a joint interview on US News and World Report,Nic says that what he wants people to take from his book is that "it's okay to be really open and honest". His father concurs. "My message is the same as Nic's – it's about openness." Hopefully, when the furore dies down, The Lost Childwill contribute not to further acrimony within the Myerson family, but to a more open discussion about kids, drugs, privacy and literary ethics.
Molly McCloskey is an American writer living in Dublin. She is the author of two collections of short stories and a novel