In 2009, the English author and critic Julie Myerson published The Lost Child, a memoir that lays bare the details of her teenage son’s drug addiction and their subsequent estrangement. The book incited a vehement debate about Myerson’s adequacy as a mother that seized British media. Other writers claimed that she had violated her son’s privacy and his right to tell his own story. One critic suggested that by writing the book she was “perpetuating the abuse of a young man that began when she and her husband exiled him from their lives.” Another called the book “a betrayal of motherhood itself.”
The Lost Child concerns her son Jake’s turbulent teenage years, when he was addicted to skunk (a particularly potent strain of cannabis) and prone to violent outbursts. In plainly anguished prose, Myerson recounts the wrenching cycle of frightening episodes that made daily life with Jake difficult. She writes that he stole his pregnant girlfriend’s cellphone, pushed marijuana on his younger brother, and during one particularly awful altercation, hit Myerson so hard, he perforated her eardrum. Finally, “as a last, terrible resort,” Myerson and her husband asked Jake, who was 17, to leave their home. (When the book was released, Jake accused his mother of publishing “fantasies” and labeled her actions “obscene.”)
Myerson’s latest novel, the affecting, and winkingly titled, Nonfiction, is clearly the progeny of that controversial earlier book. An unnamed protagonist—who, like Myerson, is a writer—is exhausted by the emotional toll of raising a teenage daughter who is addicted to drugs. After she and her husband ask their daughter to move out, months pass during which they don’t hear from her. At times they wonder whether she is still alive. When they do see her, it is for frustrating, unproductive family therapy sessions, or when she stops by to beg for money.
During one of those therapy sessions, the protagonist remembers an incisive, if cruel, observation her daughter once made about her: “You never stop talking … It’s insane, how much you seem to love the sound of your own voice. Don’t you realise that everyone thinks you’re a self-centred maniac?” The accusation made the protagonist pause, because although she earned a living writing about herself, she had grown troubled by her work: Other people’s stories had become tangled up in her own, and she was not certain what she owed those people. Surely it wasn’t good to be drawing so much attention to herself, to be offering up so much of her life—and others’—for public consumption. The ethical dilemma of writing about the self is both the core tension of Nonfiction and what beckons it into existence. Despite the criticism she has faced in the past, and the consequences her writing has had on her family, Myerson insists that telling one’s story is necessary and meaningful, and that a desire to tell it is grounds for it to exist.
Before The Lost Child, Myerson had written 10 books in 15 years: seven novels and three works of nonfiction. From 2006 to 2009, she was also the anonymous author of a weekly column on parenting called “Living With Teenagers,” published by The Guardian, in which she divulged details of her children’s temper tantrums, misbehaviors, and embarrassing blunders amid puberty. As the outrage about The Lost Child intensified, readers deduced that the column was Myerson’s, and condemned her for disrespecting her children’s privacy. In response, her editors at The Guardian removed the column from the newspaper’s website.
Although the furor eventually died down, in interviews, Myerson described struggling with the long-term effects of being publicly shamed. She battled unmanageable anxiety. She now believes the pain of that time is why she suffers chronic fatigue syndrome. “A little bit of me broke,” she told The Guardian when Nonfiction was released in the United Kingdom, in 2022.
In the 15 years since The Lost Child, Myerson has published four books, including Nonfiction. All of them are novels. In many ways, this latest work is Myerson’s return to the memoir that upended her life. Though traces of that controversy are all over it—the protagonist spends a good deal of the book mulling the risks she’s taking by writing about her family—it is, fortunately, not merely Myerson’s attempt to defend The Lost Child. Instead, the protagonist wrestles with her aspirations as a writer and her duties as a mother; the two are constantly at odds. The book is written in the second person, addressing the protagonist’s daughter, a decision that imparts a desire for understanding, to cross the gulch that has opened between them. One evening, while the protagonist is at a pub following a book event, her daughter calls. When she answers, her daughter’s voice sounds strange. Eager to get back to her glass of wine, the protagonist ends the call quickly. The regret she feels in hindsight is palpable. Ruefully, she wonders: “Why am I so keen to finish my dinner? What exactly is so interesting about my book? … Why don’t I just get up and go outside into the street and stand there and listen to you?”
Myerson’s unpolished portrayal of her narrator—a mother who is loving and reckless, selfish and devoted, buckling beneath the strain of motherhood and marriage, and bewildered by the demands of her daughter’s condition—makes Nonfiction a poignant, if subdued, read at times. She embarks on a flat and unappealing affair with an ex-boyfriend, though her motivations for this are unclear. After years of bitter quarrels, manipulation, and resentment, she has become so estranged from her own mother that when she learns of her death, she feels not sadness but disbelief that the “bully” who caused her such pain was gone. Myerson’s cool and restrained sentences prickle with thwarted emotion and mislaid ambition, as if to convey how hard the protagonist is working to keep the lid on her life.
A feeling of triumph glimmers between the lines of Nonfiction. By returning to material she was once told she never should have written, Myerson reasserts her right to write about whatever she pleases, detractors be damned. This book is her first true foray into autofiction, a genre that was less defined when she wrote The Lost Child than it is today, and it better suits her inclinations as a writer than memoir. For one, it allows for the deliberate dissembling and rearranging of the truth. As Myerson has said, “This book is completely made up. It is also completely true.”
Yet the confines of Nonfiction grow perplexingly and frustratingly narrow as the book progresses. The narrator may be flayed open, but the other characters are held at arm’s length, vague and bloodless. Her husband is such a faint presence that when she begins her affair, the reader might be hard-pressed to describe what kind of man she is betraying or identify quite what the affair offers her that her marriage cannot. Her daughter is described in stark extremes: a once-cherubic infant who’s now a churlish adolescent bent on self-destruction. The protagonist recounts terrible details—the marks on her daughter’s arms, her unlaundered clothes, her piteous pleas for money—but doesn’t attempt to understand what she may have sought from drugs in the first place.
Reading Nonfiction reminded me of the Irish novelist Colm Tóibín’s succinct warning about the pitfalls of autofictional writing: “The page you face is not a mirror. It is blank.” I wanted Myerson to step back from the mirror at times, to more fully engage with her other characters. But Myerson seems most interested in parsing the act of writing about one’s personal experiences. Who owns a story? When does writing about someone else become a betrayal? And why is she so compelled to write about her life, despite the consequences she’s faced in the past? These are the novel’s animating questions. Given all that she has endured, Myerson had the opportunity to offer fascinating answers.
Instead, she supplies noncontroversial defenses of artistic expression. The narrator recalls how, when she was asked to discuss the autobiographical nature of her work on a panel at a literary festival, she floundered to find an answer. Fortunately, another panelist, a poet, stepped in with her own response, which the narrator remembers with admiration: “All of it, every line of every poem she’s ever written, has arisen from her precise state of mind at the time, her experience of family, love, friendship, of loss and sorrow and the sometimes quite challenging events of her own real life.” The poet had finished by saying that she “can’t think of anything more urgent or valid to write about than that.” It’s difficult to share the protagonist’s awe at this statement, which is both incontrovertible and commonplace. It also takes for granted that there is as much meaning to be found in reading someone else’s personal story as there is in writing it. For the protagonist, relaying the poet’s comments seems to serve as justification for the risky decision she makes, over and over, to write from her life.
In the very first scene of Nonfiction, the protagonist and her husband prepare to attend a dinner party. Before they leave their house, they take a kind of unusual precaution that is necessitated by their daughter’s addiction: They lock all the doors and leave a hammer on a table in the hall. The protagonist reasons that if an emergency arises, her daughter will be able to break a window using the hammer and escape. It’s an inane choice, she knows—her daughter might decide to use the hammer to break out even in the absence of an emergency—but it offers her peace of mind, at least enough to enjoy the party.
By the end of the book, the meaning of this anecdote is clear: For the mother, locking her daughter up with a hammer is a little like writing about her life. It’s a choice she makes. She has to live with it.
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