Posts by Jolisa
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Nicely put, Joe. Christopher Milne was on my mind as well.
And he's an interesting counter-example to the notion that as long as one writes only sweetness and light about one's children (as opposed to "my rotten druggie son boxed my ears and I felt like a crap mother"), it will all be fine.
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To me the judgement is the behaviour, backed up by writing all about it for profit. It seems like her only concern from the little I've heard about it is herself and her publishing.
If only writers made as much money from books as people think they do. I wonder how much profit she's really going to make from this one. Enough to do up the bathroom maybe? If you're (arguably) going to sell out your kids for money, it seems just sad to do it for so little, eh.
It seems like her only concern from the little I've heard about it is herself and her publishing.
And this is the bit I keep getting stuck on. Because the "little we've heard about it" consists of one interview with her, one with her husband, and one with her son - supplemented by a whole flotilla of comments running approximately 100:1 in favour of her son and against her, while the husband (who according to one account encouraged her to include the material about the son in the book she was working on) sort of gets lost in the discussion somewhere.
I'm not saying a million frothing Englishmen and women must be wrong. I'm just horribly fascinated by the furious unanimity about it. ("I'll be judge, I'll be jury, said cunning old Fury..."). I mean, there's cautionary tale, and then there's head-on-a-stake.
The word "witch-burning" springs to mind. Which is not to say she's not one -- who the hell knows anything at this point?? (even those anonymous Guardian columns, while horrible, aren't terribly different from things other people have published about their children over the years, and after all, why shouldn't parents of teenagers speak truth to power on how hard it can be, if they can do it gracefully) -- but maybe perhaps a ducking stool was all that was called for here??
I dunno. There's still something weirdly fishy about the intensity of the brouhaha. P'raps she is just a timely (ahem) "escape-goat" for a broader sense of shared guilt about prurient over-indulgence in information about other people's private lives? Selfish, indulgent idiots, all of us... and yet all we're doing is living the village life, writ in our genes, writ large on the web. We can't help ourselves.
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Or he just hasn't been paid enough yet :-)
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I think she is on trial for exploiting her son for profit.
Evidently. But is that what she has done? Or, is that all she has done?
(Not being a duffer; genuinely interested in teasing it out).
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Ian Jack has a very sage and balanced take on the whole thing, in the Guardian. He's so much more eloquent than I am and says much of what I've been struggling to articulate.
I should add that I'm entirely sympathetic to the basic points of Russell's post, which I take to be: the importance of an expectation of privacy, and a basic principle of kindness towards family members who are in a bad way.
But, I'm also piqued by the degree of public vituperation aimed at Myerson, amid chirpy references to her bad case of "reefer madness." When something boils over as suddenly and as unanimously as this, I sense a whole other bunch of moral panics boiling away underneath the discussion, ones that are perhaps easily dismissed because they play into broadly accepted cliches about the smug moralising middle-classes, and bossy mothers, and women writers and what they may or may not say...
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No, I've never met a 17 year old. Nor been one either.
Er, when I said help, I meant help. Not quote-unquote dismissive or panic-mongering "help." Like, help to sort out what he wants to get out of school or if he wants to be at school at all. Help to figure out what to do about his depression. Help to get through the massive transition of being moved out of the only house you know as home. Help any of us would be grateful for at any age when shit is going down.
And, also, maybe help remembering the boundaries between one's own drug use and that of much younger family members, and that it's not OK to hit people, even if they want their door keys back.
Obviously the parents needed help, too. They asked for some, they got some, they needed more. They did what they could to help their younger offspring, who also needed help.
Look, I feel for Jake. I feel for his siblings. And I feel for his parents. It's not mutually exclusive. And we're all unreliable witnesses, even and especially of our own behaviour. I'm still not entirely sure what Myerson's chief crime is (writing? publication? profit therefrom?) but I'm pretty sure she's on trial for something: "selfish," "indulgent," and "idiot" are pretty strong words.
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Here's an illuminating excerpt from the book. He certainly sounds depressed -- not getting out of bed, not wanting to move house, not wanting to go to school. The boy needs help.
And yet, here he is throwing things through the windows and breaking into the house. "By early May, he will have punched his father. By late May, he will have hit me so hard on the side of my head that I’ll be in A&E with a perforated ear drum," writes Myerson. He's supplying drugs to his younger siblings.
This is just one side of the story, of course. There's a horrible mutual escalation going on here, and a child in danger. But other people are in danger too -- and I'm still not sure I can fault the parents entirely.
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I may have to read the book, if only to find out what else the Myerson parents tried before moving straight to 80s style "Tough Love".
Which apparently doesn't work, anyway.
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Oh and to echo Emma: the bright line (not very bright or liney) for writing about one's children is, for me too, age-related. Which must have something to do with knowing that they can read and respond and speak for themselves.
Which strikes me as paradoxical - shouldn't one instinctively be more protective of those who can't respond? Or are we (and by "we" I mean me) guilty of some horrible writerly version of that ghastly medical lie that babies don't feel pain?
Totally guilty as charged.
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Ouch. Yes, indisputably, Myerson wrote too soon -- and too much under her own name, thus endangering her son's own chances of finding his own way through his own story. The story is not over until it's over, and by writing the story down, Myerson has arrogated to herself the privilege of wrapping up the narrative.
No matter how naughty or nasty or beguilingly deceptive her son is (and I'm not saying he is, but who knows, he might be), that's just mean. Based on what I'm reading in the tabloids and on internet chat groups (all of it worth approximately as much as the paper it's written on), it sounds like Myerson and her husband wildly overreacted to some (gulp) not abnormal teen behaviour. With unhappy fallout for big brother and, down the line, his younger siblings.
But... I don't think the topic per se is entirely out of bounds. Compare these two other recent books about wayward adolescents, written -- at least to some degree -- with the blessing or cooperation of the young people in question: Debra Gwartney's Live Through This and David Sheff's Beautiful Boy. NB Gwartney's daughters participated in a radio version of their story, and Sheff's son Nic wrote his own book.
Huge disclaimer: I haven't actually read any of the three books, nor Myerson's. I'm too scared to!
I guess the question is: who are these parents writing for, and why? Writing in search of understanding and community with similarly troubled parents is not a crime. But trespassing on your children's (adult) privacy is. Isn't it? And/but/or is it worse than a memoir published under your own name about how horrible your (alive, or recently deceased) parents were? Of which the list is so long I don't even know where to begin, but Running With Scissors would be a start.Given the meta-fictional nature of Myerson's project (something that might have lent her book subtlety but has been blown wide open by the media palaver), there's another parallel: Siri Hustvedt's novel What I Loved, which contains a fictionalised version of her husband Paul Auster's troubled son. Myerson is not the first or the last to use family tragedy as grist for the fictional mill. She may be the first to be so thoroughly pilloried for it, though. To paraphrase my home boy Ali G, is it because she is a muvver?
So... should Myerson have worked harder to fictionalise Jake? Or just waited longer to publish her thoughts? Is this not so much about what can be said, but when?* Cue discussion on the 24/7 nature of news cycles, the rise of real-time memoir, the appalling Jade Goody death-watch, etc.
Not defending, just musing.
* See also Auster's diplomatic, circumspect 2002 response to an inquiry about his son: Daniel "is currently finding himself -- ask me again in a couple of years."