I can well imagine my children saying to me: ‘This is off the record, Dad’
As a member of the chattering classes, I am riveted by the Julie Myerson story. For those of you who haven’t been following it, Myerson has just published a book called The Lost Child in which she intercuts the story of a Regency watercolourist who died aged 21 with the story of her own wayward son whom she and her husband kicked out of home when he was 17, mainly because he refused to stop smoking cannabis.
Almost every Glenda Slagg on Fleet Street has weighed in on the topic, with the majority condemning Myerson. It is not the banishment of her son that they object to, but the fact that she has chosen to recount the story in a non-fiction book. She appears to have breached an unwritten rule, namely, that you shouldn’t tell damaging stories about your children in print.
This issue is close to my heart because I write about my own children all the time. I take some comfort from the fact that they have never objected — unlike Jake Myerson, who has lashed out against his mother in the Daily Mail — but that is not much of a defence since the eldest is only five. No doubt as they get older we will have to establish some ground rules. I am told that in Adrian Gill’s household his teenage children preface all dinner-table conversation with the phrase, ‘This is off the record, Dad’ and I can easily imagine my children doing the same.
Myerson’s situation is complicated by the fact that she showed her son a copy of The Lost Child in manuscript form. According to her, he reluctantly consented to its publication, while at the same time telling her he didn’t approve of the fact that she had written it.
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