I was once on a panel that gave a prestigious award to Julie Myerson for her first novel, Sleepwalking, an elegantly overwrought account of an abused woman who begins a passionate affair.
Myerson has said there are autobiographical elements to it, but if so they were properly obfuscated by the routine devices of fiction.
She since seems to have forgotten that all good fiction is a form of psychic autobiography: there's no need to give such revelations the seeming authority of fact, when fiction speaks with greater authenticity.
In the intervening decade and a half, Myerson has carved herself a literary career using the actualité of her own life for copy. This writerly cannibalism has now reached a grim apotheosis, with the author herself pre-puffing her latest book, The Lost Child, with revelations of how she and her husband exiled their eldest child from the family home because of his addiction to marijuana.
Jake Myerson yesterday gave his side of the story, telling this newspaper that his mother was “mad”, and that both his parents were gripped by a US-style “War on Drugs” hysteria that made them conflate ordinary teenage puffing with reefer madness. I don't want to get into the he-said, she-said of the Myerson family's meltdown, although I do think it significant that Jake Myerson has a job and is perfectly articulate, rather than some mumbling stoner. What I find utterly mad about his mother's behaviour is that she's decided to cash in on this tale so egregiously.
Julie Myerson says that “it's the most traumatic thing that's ever happened to us”. Why, therefore, broadcast it to the world, which can only provoke more schism in a family where the eldest child hasn't even talked to his parents for a year? Ah, says she, that's because I want to help other parents who are similarly affected.
This could even be dubbed “the therapeutic defence”, rolled out by every self-seeking maker of a public confession who crawls on to daytime TV. The only difference with Myerson is that she has some middlebrow cachet.
I always tell people who seek my advice about such antics the same thing: don't expect the reading public to provide you with psychotherapy. But what makes Myerson's behaviour so much worse is that she's perpetuating the abuse of a young man that began when she and her husband exiled him from their lives — and doing it in public.
Yes, drug addiction is a dreadful thing. And yes, so-called “tough love” can be the best way to deal with addicts who won't stop using — but such confrontations should be handled in private, while giving the addict an alternative, preferably treatment.
We don't know if the Myersons gave Jake this option — but somehow I doubt it. If they had, and Jake had accepted, and the entire family had been interviewed by a good professional addiction counsellor, I suspect it would've been Jake who'd driven away again, leaving his mother behind for some serious treatment.
• To the London School of Economics in Lincoln's Inn to appear at its new literary festival — honestly, if things keep on like this you won't be able to go to the corner shop without tripping over a lit fest.
Still, the LSE one was an amiable affair, and I was able to both read a scene from my latest book that actually takes place within yards of where we were, and to speak of my childhood, when my father — who taught at the school — had his office around the corner in Portugal Street.
None of this profound localism seemed to make much impact on the audience. It could be that like many young people they had no real interest in place — or, alternatively, so inured were they to the whole lit fest go-round, that they thought they were in Hay, or Edinburgh, or possibly Dubai — all of which host similar worthy endeavours.
• It seems that an ex-Thames Valley copper is making a mint by providing mandatory “speed awareness” courses to drivers nicked for going over the limit. Speaking as someone currently awaiting a sentence for speeding — 37mph on Kennington Lane, since you ask — I hope I get the opportunity to contribute to this chap's pension rather than the Exchequer.
Allegedly only three per cent of his graduates re-offend, whereas in my life I've been nicked for being a boy racer, a man racer and now that most inglorious of things, a middle-aged man racer. I could've saved hundreds of pounds over the decades if only I'd attended a “speed awareness” course when I was 20.
But why stop there: why not give everyone who takes their test a mandatory course? Who could possibly object, save for the car manufacturers, the people who make speed cameras, traffic police and Jeremy Clarkson?
The dreaming spires point to accountancy
In all the brouhaha surrounding the stripping of Corpus Christi's University Challenge title one dismal fact seems to have been overlooked. The villain of the piece, Sam Kay, whose failure to 'fess up to no longer being a student resulted in his team's disgrace, was employed as a trainee accountant while leaning on the buzzer.
Meanwhile, the team's captain, pulchritudinous classicist Gail Trimble, has announced her own forthcoming marriage — to a trainee accountant.
What is it with all this accountancy? In my day Corpus graduates went on to write erudite critiques of the Metaphysical poets, not tot up sums, let alone become affianced to such totters. I can't help feeling that it's this dull worship of Mammon that these striplings should be punished for, rather than their trifling perfidy.
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