Toby Young
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Almost every Glenda Slagg on Fleet Street has weighed in on the topic, with the majority condemning Myerson. It is not the banishment of her son that they object to, but the fact that she has chosen to recount the story in a non-fiction book. She appears to have breached an unwritten rule, namely, that you shouldn’t tell damaging stories about your children in print.
This issue is close to my heart because I write about my own children all the time. I take some comfort from the fact that they have never objected — unlike Jake Myerson, who has lashed out against his mother in the Daily Mail — but that is not much of a defence since the eldest is only five. No doubt as they get older we will have to establish some ground rules. I am told that in Adrian Gill’s household his teenage children preface all dinner-table conversation with the phrase, ‘This is off the record, Dad’ and I can easily imagine my children doing the same.
Myerson’s situation is complicated by the fact that she showed her son a copy of The Lost Child in manuscript form. According to her, he reluctantly consented to its publication, while at the same time telling her he didn’t approve of the fact that she had written it. He disputes this version of events, claiming she was planning to publish it regardless. ‘After reading it I said, “There is no way to stop you publishing this, is there?”’ he told the Daily Mail. He even consulted a lawyer, who told him there wasn’t anything he could do.
I was surprised by that last revelation, since my hunch is that Jake Myerson might have a case under Article Eight of the European Convention on Human Rights. British judges are quite sympathetic when a child’s right to privacy is at stake, and Jake could argue that his mother had violated that right. Interestingly, Jake’s father, who is a magistrate, has argued that his partner had a duty to publish in order to warn other parents about the dangers of skunk, a particularly strong form of cannabis. To my ears, that sounds like something he believes it is prudent to stress because in the event of Jake bringing a case against his mother that would be the central plank of her defence.
Of course, none of the above means Julie Myerson was wrong to publish the book. It is not just memoir-writers and journalists who have to wrestle with the issue of whether to turn their nearest and dearest into material — novelists and poets face a similar dilemma. To a greater or lesser extent, all writing is personal, and if you have a writer in the family the chances are that he or she will have upset some family members in the course of his or her career.
My view is that whether a writer is justified in ransacking his or her own life in this way hinges on just how much literary merit the work in question possesses. For instance, Philip Roth was criticised for allegedly basing a character in I Married a Communist on his ex-wife Claire Bloom, but I regard that as entirely justified since it is such a good book. The bar is pretty high, though. You have to produce something approaching a masterpiece if you’re going to ride roughshod over other people’s feelings like that.
Is The Lost Child in that league? I haven’t read it so I don’t know. But the difficulty for all writers who take themselves seriously — and Myerson clearly does — is that you have to proceed as if you’re going to produce a masterpiece and follow your muse accordingly, no matter how many people you upset. That utter ruthlessness is a necessary condition of being any good — what Graham Greene called the splinter of ice in the heart. Ultimately, I sympathise with Myerson because, like her, I labour under the illusion that one day I might produce something that actually has some literary merit.
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