Publish and be damned Mum?

Julie Myerson, mother journalist and author, has mined a rich seam of family life and intimate anecdotes in her, often anonymous, newspaper columns over the years.

Buying the first bra, getting the first pubic - or should that be public -hairs (and earning her son the nickname Mr Three Hairs at school) and inevitably begging the question how private are your children’s private lives entitled to be when their mother writes for a living.

Now the middle-class Myserson from South London has found herself pilloried over a new book ‘The Lost Child’, chronicling her 20-year-old son Jake’s descent into skunk cannabis.

The 48-year-old writer and her husband Jonathan say they hope the book will bring to light the horrors of skunk and how it can change a sweet boy into a foul-mouthed, thieving and bullying horror story, who hits his mother, gets a girl pregnant.

You have to write the book you have to write, Myerson has been quoted as saying of the book likely to become a best seller.

But do you when the outcome is putting your vulnerable, drug abusing son centre ring in a mad media circus?

The Mail talks of the biggest public display of dirty laundry since washday on the river Ganges .

Jake Myerson is pictured in the papers bare chested and wearing rosary beads dangling over his waif-like frame. 

It’s a sad, sad story but is it one that should be told when the central figure is your own son and his life is in crisis?

The Lost Child published by Bloomsbury (www.bloomsbury.com) this month rrp £14.99.

Posted Mon, 03/16/2009 - 16:57 by Anonymous