When Writing About Your Children Is a Form of Betrayal

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.”

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 of publishing “fantasies” and labeled her actions “obscene.”)