The Lost Child

by Julie Myerson, Bloomsbury, 336pp, £14.99, Week Bookshop £13.49 (incl. p&p). "There can be few who are not familiar with the saga of the Myersons by now," said Amanda Craig in the Times. The writers Julie and Jonathan Myerson discovered that their 15-year-old son Jake was smoking skunk, a potent form of cannabis, and after a two-year attempt to control his erratic and violent behaviour, locked him out of their home. Julie chose to write a book about the experience; and as a result was pilloried by many newspaper columnists, as well as her son - who claimed that she had overreacted to his moderate drug use, and has persistently exploited his life in her writing.

Now, rushed into print, comes the book itself, which is as bad as the worst that was said about it: "grossly intrusive" on the life of a damaged child, but also poorly written, humourless and deeply misconceived. At the time of her son's troubles, Myerson was working on a biography of one Mary Yelloly, a promising Regency-era amateur painter who died aged 21. She has tried to weave the stories of Jake and Mary together in a way that is so hamfisted as to be "embarrassing".

It's baffling that The Lost Child attracted such "extreme, shrill and personal" criticism, said Kate Kellaway in the Observer. "If Britain did a line in fatwas, Myerson would have been for it." The fact is that people have written disobliging memoirs about their families for decades - not excluding their struggles with babies and children. This was clearly a book that had to be written. Cannabis changed Myerson's son's character: it made him drop out of school, intimidate and hit his parents; even give drugs to his younger siblings. "She has tried to write honestly about a nightmarish situation and a subject that never seems to get the attention it deserves" - people are in denial about the catastrophic effect that skunk can have on teenagers.

Myerson writes that when Jake was shown the manuscript, he wasn't outraged; he only made a number of small factual corrections and remarked that he "wasn't all that interested in the stuff about the Mary Yelloly person". I'm with him on that, said Katy Guest in the Independent. But the rest of the book is deeply gripping - whatever you think about the ethics of writing it. "And anyone who reads it will struggle not to be profoundly moved." The Lost Child is a flawed book, said Jane Shilling in the Daily Telegraph, but it's a powerful one: "a serious, writerly, self-critical account of what it means to feel that, despite love and hope and good intentions, you have failed as a parent, and that the child you bore (while still eerily, painfully familiar) is lost to you".

FIRST POSTED MARCH 26, 2009