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COURAGE mon amie, I say to Julie Myerson. Her new book, The Lost Child, is a candid reflection on her son Jake, whose teenage cannabis habit led to a calamitous family breakdown and his ejection from the home. All week the writer has been vilified as heartless, an evil mother, and a canny money-spinner selling her own flesh for cash. Pray why the molten vituperation? Because she rejects the Victorian codes of bourgeois family life, where chintz and decorum concealed domestic unrest, violence, betrayal and malice. In his fascinating BBC series on 19th-century art, Jeremy Paxman revealed the sordid realities behind many an idealised family portrait. The recession and costume dramas have brought on fresh nostalgia for those corseted times of thrift and containment when society appeared safe and sound even though it was as least as "broken" as ours is today.
That is a trick used by countless writers who haven’t the guts to write about real experiences, one of the hardest things to do, with consequences that usually sour financial gain even for authors who have churned out bestsellers. The black barrister Constance Briscoe wrote about her struggles to overcome a blighted childhood, and was taken to court by her mother. Frank McCourt, author of Angela’s Ashes, an account of his squalid childhood, has had endless flack, as have others accused of producing "misery porn". It ain’t easy for those who feel they must publish and be damned. Jake has spoken out against his mum, which is his right, surely. Julie Myerson has to accept that. She has done herself proud, and us a service, by exposing the new age of hypocrisy. — By arrangement with The Independent
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The romanticised 1950s
similarly buried family crises. Myerson may have become the first victim
of this urge to go back to the future. Her face has replaced Fred
Goodwin’s in the hall of treachery. The self-righteous want society
once again to hide secrets and lies and put on a good front. Myerson’s
crime is that she is unflinchingly honest. Some of her friends now say
she should have softened or withheld the story, or pretended it was
"fiction".