I promise this will be my last post on the subject. But being a writer and having a teenage son, I've been a bit consumed with the Myerson affair.
Remember Vicky Pollard? Of course you do!
Yesterday someone advised Julie Myerson to hit back and appear on Newsnight to answer accusations of exploiting her son for literary (read financial) gain. This is what happened when she was hauled up in front of Paxman.
It's exactly like watching an upmarket Vicky Pollard! Everything from the impenetrable rant to the wavering off subject and self-justification to the flapping hands. I haven't been so embarrassed for someone since I saw Sarah Brightman in a negligee wafting round a piano playing Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Showing posts with label Julie Myerson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Julie Myerson. Show all posts
Tuesday, 10 March 2009
Saturday, 7 March 2009
More Plundering
Been reading a lot today about Juliegate. Opinion seems to fall firmly into two camps; those who are taking her discomfiture as a good ol' opportunity to give her a right kicking, (I never liked her, I hated her on Newsnight, I hate journalists who use their family in columns etc) and those who feel that unless you've had a teenage skunk addict in the house you don't know what you're talking about.
There are loads of cannabis websites that are firmly of the opinion that skunk is harmless and just as many unhappy parents who are equally firm about how skunk destroyed their child. Those who believe that skunk is harmless skip over the details of Jake Myerson's horrible behaviour at home, dismissing it as the whinings of a privileged successful woman who has somehow got her comeuppance. Ever since online papers introduced comments from readers you have to keep reminding yourself that you haven't wandered onto the Daily Mail site by mistake. You wonder what would happen if you became well known and then something went wrong. All those people lining up to say how much they always hated you . . . . .
I still don't think she did the right thing in making this particular batch of family laundry so public. Maybe Jake's real 'crime' was dropping a huge bomb into the family life she spent so much time and energy constructing, having had such a miserable childhood herself. Even Jake admits that his "childhood was idyllic."
And I think of The Boy who being a teenager Knows Everything about Everything. Tch! And think of Myerson's anguished description of Jake's growing paranoia, hitting her so hard she ends up in A&E, then being ok the next day, then chucking pots of plants through the front door, until Jonathan Myerson, hands shaking dials 999. How would I feel calling the police on my own son? Desperate and Shit in equal measure. I can't believe she's made this stuff up. And what do you do? You don't stop loving your boy - even if you hate his guts.
On the other hand there's Jake acting as though he smoked a few spliffs and his parents go nuts and chuck him out of the house. The kind of grandiose behaviour that only a teenager (mostly) is capable of.
The other day, The Boy forgot to take his lunch (prepared by me) out of the fridge. It was pretty damn obvious, a large box filled with food sitting in the middle of the fridge. Alas, there was no label on it reading LUNCH FOR THE BOY. So he forgot it. I was upset and on the point of driving to school to drop it off when Husband pointed out that he wasn't going to learn to switch his brain on in the morning unless he learned consequences. "Put the car keys down woman" he finished, sternly. I did. But when The Boy came home he squawked that he "couldnt' find his lunch in the fridge!" How could he not have seen it? "I. Just. Couldn't!" yelled The Boy, absolutely secure in his rightness and my unequivocal wrongness.
I thought of that conversation today and his utter conviction that he knows everything and I can teach him nothing. How would I cope if it was about cannabis and not his inability to find his lunch right in front of his eyes? Badly I suspect.
There are loads of cannabis websites that are firmly of the opinion that skunk is harmless and just as many unhappy parents who are equally firm about how skunk destroyed their child. Those who believe that skunk is harmless skip over the details of Jake Myerson's horrible behaviour at home, dismissing it as the whinings of a privileged successful woman who has somehow got her comeuppance. Ever since online papers introduced comments from readers you have to keep reminding yourself that you haven't wandered onto the Daily Mail site by mistake. You wonder what would happen if you became well known and then something went wrong. All those people lining up to say how much they always hated you . . . . .
I still don't think she did the right thing in making this particular batch of family laundry so public. Maybe Jake's real 'crime' was dropping a huge bomb into the family life she spent so much time and energy constructing, having had such a miserable childhood herself. Even Jake admits that his "childhood was idyllic."
And I think of The Boy who being a teenager Knows Everything about Everything. Tch! And think of Myerson's anguished description of Jake's growing paranoia, hitting her so hard she ends up in A&E, then being ok the next day, then chucking pots of plants through the front door, until Jonathan Myerson, hands shaking dials 999. How would I feel calling the police on my own son? Desperate and Shit in equal measure. I can't believe she's made this stuff up. And what do you do? You don't stop loving your boy - even if you hate his guts.
On the other hand there's Jake acting as though he smoked a few spliffs and his parents go nuts and chuck him out of the house. The kind of grandiose behaviour that only a teenager (mostly) is capable of.
The other day, The Boy forgot to take his lunch (prepared by me) out of the fridge. It was pretty damn obvious, a large box filled with food sitting in the middle of the fridge. Alas, there was no label on it reading LUNCH FOR THE BOY. So he forgot it. I was upset and on the point of driving to school to drop it off when Husband pointed out that he wasn't going to learn to switch his brain on in the morning unless he learned consequences. "Put the car keys down woman" he finished, sternly. I did. But when The Boy came home he squawked that he "couldnt' find his lunch in the fridge!" How could he not have seen it? "I. Just. Couldn't!" yelled The Boy, absolutely secure in his rightness and my unequivocal wrongness.
I thought of that conversation today and his utter conviction that he knows everything and I can teach him nothing. How would I cope if it was about cannabis and not his inability to find his lunch right in front of his eyes? Badly I suspect.
Thursday, 5 March 2009
Plundering your life
The novelist Julie Myerson is in a whole load of trouble for using her son Jake's drug troubles in her new book. She pleads that old chestnut about doing it to 'help' other parents who can't understand what happened to their ordinarily grumpy teenager and have suddenly been landed with a smacked up extra from Trainspotting.
This all happened three years ago. Jake is now 20 and brands his mother 'insane'. She claims he became violent and abusive while on cannabis, and after several warnings, she and her husband changed the locks and threw him out. But whether or not the book is a success, or whether it helps other middle-class parents, it's unlikely that her relationship with her son will ever be properly repaired. It's not just the writing about the drugs - she used some of his poetry. Teenage poetry. I'd never live that one down.
To be fair to Myerson it must have been hellish to deal with an angry stoner. She says it "hit us out of nowhere" and being a writer you deal with it, by writing.
This mining your family - well, a lot of people do it. Including me. I put a spin on the essentially mundane; blither about the various doings of The Boy, The Husband and The Girl. And all writers dig about in the cesspit of their psyche. I'm writing something now about adolescence precisely because its a time that we never forget. It shapes us like red hot metal in a furnace. Adolescence brands us. I don't think I'd want my teenage idiocies (and there were many of them) forever emblazoned in print. But I was watching telly this morning as a friend of mine, Stephanie Calman who has written a book about her difficult relationship with her mother, called How (Not) to Murder Your Mother was appearing with another mother who had set up a website to deal with the misery of her son's skunk addiction.
Stephanie pointed out that we all have our own reality, and Jake's reality may have been very different from his mother's. The other mother spoke movingly of her utter despair at her son's change of personality, and her total isolation and inability to help him. (She used pseudonyms to avoid recognition). But what struck me was that both Stephanie and the other woman were both upfront about what they were writing; it was factual. Whereas with Myerson, the story of Jake crept in to a novel she was already writing and began to take over. Fact and fiction can oh so easily blur and other people's lives become mere grist to your literary mill.
There is also the uncomfortable question of writerly arrogance. If you're a really good writer, and Julie Myerson is, it's again very easy to assume that any hurt you're inflicting is transcended by your talent. That old chestnut - the talented don't have to abide by rules and can trample in a cavalier fashion over others.
I don't know what the answer is. If The Boy suddenly developed a skunk habit, would I blog about it? And if I were offered a publishing contract to write about it, would I?
This all happened three years ago. Jake is now 20 and brands his mother 'insane'. She claims he became violent and abusive while on cannabis, and after several warnings, she and her husband changed the locks and threw him out. But whether or not the book is a success, or whether it helps other middle-class parents, it's unlikely that her relationship with her son will ever be properly repaired. It's not just the writing about the drugs - she used some of his poetry. Teenage poetry. I'd never live that one down.
To be fair to Myerson it must have been hellish to deal with an angry stoner. She says it "hit us out of nowhere" and being a writer you deal with it, by writing.
This mining your family - well, a lot of people do it. Including me. I put a spin on the essentially mundane; blither about the various doings of The Boy, The Husband and The Girl. And all writers dig about in the cesspit of their psyche. I'm writing something now about adolescence precisely because its a time that we never forget. It shapes us like red hot metal in a furnace. Adolescence brands us. I don't think I'd want my teenage idiocies (and there were many of them) forever emblazoned in print. But I was watching telly this morning as a friend of mine, Stephanie Calman who has written a book about her difficult relationship with her mother, called How (Not) to Murder Your Mother was appearing with another mother who had set up a website to deal with the misery of her son's skunk addiction.
Stephanie pointed out that we all have our own reality, and Jake's reality may have been very different from his mother's. The other mother spoke movingly of her utter despair at her son's change of personality, and her total isolation and inability to help him. (She used pseudonyms to avoid recognition). But what struck me was that both Stephanie and the other woman were both upfront about what they were writing; it was factual. Whereas with Myerson, the story of Jake crept in to a novel she was already writing and began to take over. Fact and fiction can oh so easily blur and other people's lives become mere grist to your literary mill.
There is also the uncomfortable question of writerly arrogance. If you're a really good writer, and Julie Myerson is, it's again very easy to assume that any hurt you're inflicting is transcended by your talent. That old chestnut - the talented don't have to abide by rules and can trample in a cavalier fashion over others.
I don't know what the answer is. If The Boy suddenly developed a skunk habit, would I blog about it? And if I were offered a publishing contract to write about it, would I?
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