Posts by Russell Brown
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My life obviously seems of interest to me, but my friends and colleagues here will have lived their own lives and done their own things in the time I was elsewhere, and the communication street runs two ways.
Don't fret too much. Nearly everyone who comes back strikes this. I clearly recall thinking:
(a) Why aren't people interested in the interesting things I've done and the places I've been?
(b) Why are they so immersed in their trivial local gossip?
The trick, I think, is to get stuck in and do something you want to do.
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Of course Myerson was out of line - but that far out of line? Or just a convenient person to play the "pale" beyond-which-we-do-not-go?
I don't envy her the tabloid odium -- no one deserves that -- although it hasn't quite been comprehensive: quite a few of the Daily Mail readers seem to be behind the tough love.
And I couldn't really condemn Myersons' actions as parents if they felt their other children were in danger, although calling in the American "tough love" experts was probably a bad idea and Jake's version of events occasionally rings more true than theirs. It must have been dreadful.
But in most other respects, the Myersons seem like baby boomer idiots who have trouble taking responsibility.
By the Myersons' own account, they decided that it was Jake's fault her novel was ailing, and that therefore he should be co-opted in to fix the narrative -- kicking, screaming and consulting lawyers if necessary. I think she quite clearly lied about the degree of consent obtained.
And her subsequent fretting about getting into a "war of words" -- after writing the book and then outing her son in her first publicity interview -- seems bizarre.
As if it were all her son's fault or something ...
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And ditto on the comments thread. What happened? Guardian comments used to be reliably, genuinely witty; now they're bollocks.
Oh yes, and predictable. They're more depressing because it's the Guardian. Although it does make me feel really good about PAS. We may have our dramas, but we seem to avoid the numbing set-piece nature of more than a few big-name discussion boards.
(Oh crap, ruined his life again by writing about him - five dollars in the therapy jar).
Just don't write about your 12 year old's pubic hair. You'll be sweet.
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Here's the sole interview Jake has done (and the one everyone else is quoting) in The Daily Mail.
He certainly doesn't come off entirely sympathetically -- he was an arrogant little shit at the time of his ejection, it would seem -- but it really annoys me that his mother seems to want to load the blame for the "war of words" onto him. As if him having his say, after she's spent two decades writing about her children, is the actual problem.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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