Hard News: Just shoot me
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This is just one side of the story, of course. There's a horrible mutual escalation going on here, and a child in danger. But other people are in danger too -- and I'm still not sure I can fault the parents entirely.
No; we weren't there.
And although I don't regard Myerson as a reliable witness, they clearly had something difficult to deal with.
But even her account of the assault raises questions. She and the hubby were off out for a night at the theatre, and, she says, her son grabbed the door key and wouldn't give it to them.
So she tries to take it from him by force and begins grappling with her son for possession of the damn key, and the assault takes place. Changes things a bit ...
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Am I the only one who read it and thought...
"Its only bloody pot"You might think that but... it's not just pot, it's <dramatic chords>SKUNK</dramatic chords>, the extra potent man-eating strain of pot, which drives even merchant bankers crazy.
It was the subject of a media beat-up in Britain this time last year. Reefer madness.
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""He certainly sounds depressed -- not getting out of bed, not wanting to move house, not wanting to go to school. The boy needs help.""
Have you either met a 17 year old? It's an insane time for a lot of kids.....and drugs are everywhere in the U.K , let's be honest...its awash.
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have you ever met a 17 year old i should say?
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Perhaps lots of other people have actual addictions to the stuff [pot], as opposed to what I think is the usual response: sitting on a couch giggling and eating lots of cheese.
Eating lots of cheese? That's not what I did, 'though it did also involve couches...
For clarification, in case y'all think I'm a dopehead, long time ago, long time before I had children, and on only a few occasions. I prefer my drugs legal these days.
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No, I've never met a 17 year old. Nor been one either.
Er, when I said help, I meant help. Not quote-unquote dismissive or panic-mongering "help." Like, help to sort out what he wants to get out of school or if he wants to be at school at all. Help to figure out what to do about his depression. Help to get through the massive transition of being moved out of the only house you know as home. Help any of us would be grateful for at any age when shit is going down.
And, also, maybe help remembering the boundaries between one's own drug use and that of much younger family members, and that it's not OK to hit people, even if they want their door keys back.
Obviously the parents needed help, too. They asked for some, they got some, they needed more. They did what they could to help their younger offspring, who also needed help.
Look, I feel for Jake. I feel for his siblings. And I feel for his parents. It's not mutually exclusive. And we're all unreliable witnesses, even and especially of our own behaviour. I'm still not entirely sure what Myerson's chief crime is (writing? publication? profit therefrom?) but I'm pretty sure she's on trial for something: "selfish," "indulgent," and "idiot" are pretty strong words.
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I think she is on trial for exploiting her son for profit.
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Ian Jack has a very sage and balanced take on the whole thing, in the Guardian. He's so much more eloquent than I am and says much of what I've been struggling to articulate.
I should add that I'm entirely sympathetic to the basic points of Russell's post, which I take to be: the importance of an expectation of privacy, and a basic principle of kindness towards family members who are in a bad way.
But, I'm also piqued by the degree of public vituperation aimed at Myerson, amid chirpy references to her bad case of "reefer madness." When something boils over as suddenly and as unanimously as this, I sense a whole other bunch of moral panics boiling away underneath the discussion, ones that are perhaps easily dismissed because they play into broadly accepted cliches about the smug moralising middle-classes, and bossy mothers, and women writers and what they may or may not say...
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I think she is on trial for exploiting her son for profit.
Evidently. But is that what she has done? Or, is that all she has done?
(Not being a duffer; genuinely interested in teasing it out).
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And, also, maybe help remembering the boundaries between one's own drug use and that of much younger family members,
It is worth noting that that element of the story is hotly contested.
and that it's not OK to hit people, even if they want their door keys back.
Of course. But by her own account she started fighting for the keys. She was supposed to be the grown-up. He was the disturbed teenager.
I'm still not entirely sure what Myerson's chief crime is (writing? publication? profit therefrom?) but I'm pretty sure she's on trial for something: "selfish," "indulgent," and "idiot" are pretty strong words.
Sorry, I'm all out of sympathy. What was the single most important thing for her and her husband after the family breakup?
To pursue her lifelong business of trading on selective accounts of her family dramas with an indulgent, lightly-fictionalised "novel" after her son begged her not to?
(This after being forced to stop writing her anonymous newspaper column after her son [either Jake or his younger sibling] had to find out about it from his friends -- who she had told without telling him!)
Or do everything she could to ensure her son's well-being and a future reconciliation?
In the interview Jake says his inability to stop her publishing sent him into a breakdown, which wrote off a year's study. She says he was all sweet when they discussed it. He says he was living in a bedsit surrounded by scary characters. But obviously, her art was the important thing.
I honestly think the words "selfish," "indulgent," and "idiot" are entirely appropriate.
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My parents are both ministers, and from time to time they have used me or my behaviour in their sermons. I'm lucky in that they both became ministers after I was 18 so everything has pretty much been retrospective. I never mind that they do this because
1) They never say anything that they wouldn't say to my face
2) I know that they love me, despite my own failings. If they can then use those as examples to help other people then that is all good.And I guess that would be the point with your writing, Russell. Everyone here can see how much you love your children when you write about them. Similarly with David and Emma and the other contributors who have talked about their children; the love and respect is obvious.
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Ian Jack has a very sage and balanced take on the whole thing, in the Guardian. He's so much more eloquent than I am and says much of what I've been struggling to articulate.
The Guardian is in an odd position, because it presumably can't acknowledge what no one is denying -- that Myerson wrote the Living With Teenagers column. As I said, given the circumstances in which she had to stop writing that, her decision to publish and be damned is astonishing.
The post-facto justification that she only ever intended for the book to slip quietly into stores is bizarre. She's a well-known writer who appears frequently on TV. And she identified her son in her first interview about it. Wow.
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Maybe when writing about our own kids we could fictionalise them, or change their name?? But if the anecdote is sympathetic maybe its OK. I read Leo's words with great interest and respect. He has added to the sum of my thoughts.
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For my money none of the players in this drama sound like very nice people. Russell's analysis seems to assume that there has to be a goodie and a badie -- but why can't the son be an obnoxious and abusive pothead, and the mother be too quick to turn the turmoil her family suffered into fodder for a book?
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For my money none of the players in this drama sound like very nice people. Russell's analysis seems to assume that there has to be a goodie and a badie -- but why can't the son be an obnoxious and abusive pothead, and the mother be too quick to turn the turmoil her family suffered into fodder for a book?
Oh, I think he probably was an obnoxious and abusive pothead. But he was also a child who by his own account was disturbed by what was happening in his parents' relationship.
I don't think that can be directly compared to Myerson's conscious, deliberate decision to write her book.
After writing her book on the basis that it was the skunk wot did it, Myerson now seems to be conceding in interviews that his parents' problems may have contributed to Jake's issues. Jake seems to have shown greater discretion than his mother in declining to go into detail.
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Or he just hasn't been paid enough yet :-)
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Maybe when writing about our own kids we could fictionalise them, or change their name?? But if the anecdote is sympathetic maybe its OK. I read Leo's words with great interest and respect. He has added to the sum of my thoughts.
I used some video of Leo talking about himself in my speech at the Autism NZ conference last year, on the basis that it was good for him to state his own case, rather than be always talked about. He knew basically what I was doing.
One father in the audience said his teenage son would be mortified at such a thing, but Leo knew I was doing it and -- because it had happened before, in the Attitude programme about our family -- it wasn't a big deal.
I did also talk specifically about some of the challenges we've faced, but I think that was the right place to do so. This, much as I love you all, wouldn't be.
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Or he just hasn't been paid enough yet :-)
I'm sure the Daily Mail would have printed it if he'd said it, but he explained that he wouldn't do so.
And yes, the flapping chequebooks were the reason I wondered whether I should write about it at all.
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I think its best we all start writing ""tell all"" stories about our mums before they start spilling the beans on us.
I mean its his ma. He says , "don't do it" and she ignores that request . That's a major dump on the relationship .That's arguebaly the death of the relationship.
Is that what she wanted? Is this revenge? Is this helpful to others? Does it confuse the role of drugs in the problem? Is it true?
bloody writers:)
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He certainly sounds depressed -- not getting out of bed, not wanting to move house, not wanting to go to school.
Sounds like a many teenagers. Was he wearing all black and having stupid hair down over his eyes?
Jolisa, I'm not sure if the judgement is so much about her behaviour, though it sounds bad.
To me the judgement is the behaviour, backed up by writing all about it for profit. It seems like her only concern from the little I've heard about it is herself and her publishing. Certainly not her son or their relationship. Why people should profit from bad parenting followed up by crappy publishing tell-alls on their bad parenting I have no idea.
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To me the judgement is the behaviour, backed up by writing all about it for profit. It seems like her only concern from the little I've heard about it is herself and her publishing.
If only writers made as much money from books as people think they do. I wonder how much profit she's really going to make from this one. Enough to do up the bathroom maybe? If you're (arguably) going to sell out your kids for money, it seems just sad to do it for so little, eh.
It seems like her only concern from the little I've heard about it is herself and her publishing.
And this is the bit I keep getting stuck on. Because the "little we've heard about it" consists of one interview with her, one with her husband, and one with her son - supplemented by a whole flotilla of comments running approximately 100:1 in favour of her son and against her, while the husband (who according to one account encouraged her to include the material about the son in the book she was working on) sort of gets lost in the discussion somewhere.
I'm not saying a million frothing Englishmen and women must be wrong. I'm just horribly fascinated by the furious unanimity about it. ("I'll be judge, I'll be jury, said cunning old Fury..."). I mean, there's cautionary tale, and then there's head-on-a-stake.
The word "witch-burning" springs to mind. Which is not to say she's not one -- who the hell knows anything at this point?? (even those anonymous Guardian columns, while horrible, aren't terribly different from things other people have published about their children over the years, and after all, why shouldn't parents of teenagers speak truth to power on how hard it can be, if they can do it gracefully) -- but maybe perhaps a ducking stool was all that was called for here??
I dunno. There's still something weirdly fishy about the intensity of the brouhaha. P'raps she is just a timely (ahem) "escape-goat" for a broader sense of shared guilt about prurient over-indulgence in information about other people's private lives? Selfish, indulgent idiots, all of us... and yet all we're doing is living the village life, writ in our genes, writ large on the web. We can't help ourselves.
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Christopher Robin Milne felt that his adult life had been hopelessly blighted, thanks to his father's ruthless exploitation of his childhood.
A while back, Mark Taslov quoted a Chinese proverb here, that went something like Men should should fear fame as pigs fear becoming fat. Pushing one's children into any kind of limelight isn't likely to do them any developmental favours. Unless they're rather lacking in personality, it's hardly likely that they'll be grateful once they're able to form their own adult opinions.
"The books live on. But in real life Toad is dead; Alice is dead; Peter Pan and Wendy are long flown; and now Christopher Robin, a 'sweet and decent' man who overcame a childhood in which he was haunted by Pooh and taunted by peers, has left without saying his prayers - he was a dedicated atheist - aged 75." Euan Ferguson, Robin's gone, but swallows linger on', The Observer, 28 April 1996.
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Nicely put, Joe. Christopher Milne was on my mind as well.
And he's an interesting counter-example to the notion that as long as one writes only sweetness and light about one's children (as opposed to "my rotten druggie son boxed my ears and I felt like a crap mother"), it will all be fine.
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And this is the bit I keep getting stuck on. Because the "little we've heard about it" consists of one interview with her, one with her husband, and one with her son
One interview with her son, but she's done several, including the original, entirely sympathetic, one in The Observer. It was this one in The Times that made me think she was an idiot.
Let's take this bit:
Until now she wanted to remain silent. “At first I thought: rise above it, be dignified,” she says, her voice high and pinched. “I didn’t want to get into a war of words.” But after she saw what Jake was saying, she felt things were getting out of hand.
She didn't want to get into a war of words, but she wrote a bloody book about it and outed her son in her first publicity interview. Pardon? Are we supposed to feel sorry for her?
And then this:
If Jake is ill, an addict — which she claims and he denies — did she really think he was capable of making a sensible decision, especially with money on the table?
“Gosh. That’s interesting,” she says. “The thing is . . . he is actually relatively happy at the moment. He doesn’t behave like an ill person. No one meeting him would think he has a problem. But I suppose what you’re saying is fair.”
There's much more of that. If the interview is an accurate representation of her thought processes, I think the kind conclusion is that she is an idiot. How on earth could an experienced writer and media figure embark on a project like this and not think five minutes ahead?
while the husband (who according to one account encouraged her to include the material about the son in the book she was working on) sort of gets lost in the discussion somewhere.
She wrote the book and I think there would be uproar at the idea that she needed hubby's permission to do so. For goodness sake, she's an adult.
The Observer's Pendennis column also has this:
Julie had a mentor
A footnote to this paper's coverage of writer Julie Myerson, who has kicked her drug-using son out of her house. Back in November 1995, she was already thinking about mothers being forced to cut ties with their kids. She wrote, just a tiny bit smugly, in the Independent about the plight of her "sunny" Colombian cleaner Consuela. "She's had to change her locks to keep her son out. 'I love him, but very bad person cannot enter my house,' she sniffs, hanging her coat where she always insists upon putting it, on a bucket hook at the top of our dark cellar steps. 'He very wild man ... I don't know ... cannot change.'" Back in those days, Myerson's own young children were described sitting on the stairs "with twin fangs of snot hanging from their noses".
It appears this isn't her first attempt to fictionalise this part of her family life.
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There's still something weirdly fishy about the intensity of the brouhaha.
This wierd sort of self-feeding media firestorm appears to be the norm in the UK at the moment. Just ask Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand...
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