A POTENT DOSE OF MOTHER COURAGE

Julie Myerson has caused a storm with revelations about her drug-using
son. Kate Kellaway says it is a book that had to be written "Write about
what you know" may be good advice.

But writing about "who" you know is something else entirely,
especially if the "who" is a member of your family.

Blake Morrison's mother was said to have had reservations about his
memoir And When Did You Last See Your Father?. Hanif Kureishi's sister
was not happy about her brother's portrait of her in The Mother, even
if it was disguised as fiction.

And Frank McCourt's memoir, Angela's Ashes, seems to have offended
half of Limerick.

Perhaps it is no accident that memoirs about children by their parents
often focus on those unable to answer back. Mothers (Rachel Cusk, Anne
Enright, Kate Figes) write about their struggles with babies.

Autistic children are given voice (George and Sam by Charlotte Moore)
and mental illness is beyond the reach of retaliatory comment (Michael
Greenberg's Hurry Down Sunshine being the most recent example). All
these books have received friendly reviews.

Yet no one who has even glanced at a newspaper recently will have
missed the explosion of outrage against Julie Myerson for writing a
memoir about her teenage son and his cannabis addiction.

For Myerson, judgment day came early - before her book had even been
published.

And some commentators (Alexander Chancellor in the Guardian, Minette
Marrin in the Sunday Times) did not even pause to register what sort
of a book she had written (describing it as a novel), let alone wait
to read it. The chorus of disapproval has been extreme, shrill and
personal; if Britain did a line in fatwas, Myerson would have been for
it. The argument has been that she has broken the ultimate rule: she
has written about her troubled young son in a way that can only damage
him further.

And, naturally, the critic that everyone has been listening to with
most attention is Jake Myerson, the subject of the book, handsomely
paid by the Daily Mail to tell his story.

He has eloquently denounced his parents and claims he was opposed to
publication from the start (his mother's account is different).

Writing always starts as a private act. And it is easy to see how The
Lost Child evolved. Julie Myerson was meant to be working on another
book about Mary Yelloly, an early 19th-century Suffolk watercolourist
who died aged 21. While researching her subject, her beloved
17-year-old son, who had become hooked on cannabis, was undergoing a
change of character.

He had become violent (knocking his mother down, perforating her
eardrum). He stole from the family, lied and - the final straw - tried
to introduce her younger children to drugs.

After two years of turbulence, Myerson threw him out, hoping that what
the drug experts advised - tough love - would work, that he would hit
rock bottom, ask for help. Meanwhile, her life and work started to
merge like dyes that were not fast - they bled into one another.

Her book became a way of continuing to be involved with her son. If
losing him felt like bereavement, writing about him was keeping him
under her roof. And perhaps, in the writing, Myerson experienced what
life would not permit: the illusion of control.

Writing the book was, in the most complicated sense, a maternal
act.

It has three strands - an unlikely plait.

First, Mary Yelloly. She was a sort of East Anglian Daisy Ashford (at
eight, already a skilful watercolourist). I enjoyed the descriptions
of her charming paintings: "Energetic bowls of fruit that seem to
crouch ready to bound off the page." But Myerson is haunted by Yelloly
in a way that the reader is not. She paces around the cemetery of
Woodton church in Suffolk, looking for her subject's grave, and the
emotional tone, fraught and wistful, seems to be as much about her
home situation as her researches. She writes in a show-your-workings
way - everything grist to her narrative mill - and repeatedly asks:
"What if?" - the novelist's question.

Yelloly needed a slender book to herself.

Instead, marooned between fact and fiction, she is destined to
continue as she began, a neglected, watery figure, upstaged by
Myerson's son.

The second strand of the plait is Julie Myerson's adolescence: the
breakdown of her parents' marriage and her ambivalent relationship
with her father, who committed suicide on the night her daughter was
born. She has touched on this material before.

In spite of its drama, I was impatient to return to the third, main
strand: Jake. Not that he has a name in this story.

While Mary Yelloly is addressed as "you" with unearned intimacy, Jake
is either "he" (the arm's-length third person) or "our boy" (the "our"
painfully debatable). What big stories these small words tell. And the
choice of tense is revealing too. Whatever century we are in, Myerson
favours the historic present; it is as if past and future tenses were
unsafe.

But her writing is never less than compelling with its lopped
lyricism, like someone who has to keep catching her breath.

She is at her best when writing about the worst times with her son;
she does not shrink from painful memories: "As usual, he is
intimidating me with his size. As usual, I feel small and sad and
staccato, powerless in my green-satin high heels." There is nothing
she flinches from describing - she even includes Jake's girlfriend's
abortion (at which I mutinied) - but Myerson's motivation is anything
but base. She could have disguised her material in a novel, but she
wanted to make sense of reality, to understand the chaos that has
overtaken her family.

She wanted to help others, herself and her son.

While the debate about the book rages, the issue at the heart of it
continues to be brushed aside, except in Jonathan Myerson's excellent
defence of his wife's labours in the Guardian. Skunk, as he said, is
the villain of this story.

An addiction counsellor tells them: "So few people understand the true
nature and seriousness of cannabis addiction. There is an awful lot of
denial out there.

And ignorance." For the unenlightened, the difference between cannabis
and skunk is explained. "'In my opinion,' the counsellor says, 'skunk
is more dangerous than heroin.

Unlike heroin, you can't ever make a full recovery.'"

The book not only has three strands, it has three audiences: Myerson,
her son and anyone who has suffered anything comparable. Any family
for whom cannabis has been a wrecker, even if they would not dream of
exposing their situation in the way Myerson has, will be grateful to
her for having done so. She may have been rash, but she has also been
courageous. She has tried to write honestly about a nightmarish
situation and a subject that never seems to get the attention it deserves.

How she and her family survive the book is not our
business.

But she has not been slow to put herself in the dock: "No parent
rejects a child in this way without feeling they've failed in the very
darkest way possible." Why not leave it to Julie Myerson to do the
judging?