Pain on the Page

I wrote about our son with huge trepidation. As a novelist, honesty has always been my goal: get it down as it really is, not as you would like it to be. In writing this story, I had to write and think about things I found very difficult, very intimate, sometimes shaming. I had to describe how it felt to watch your child – previously the gentlest person you could think of – kick down locked doors in fury because he’d been denied money. I also had to put myself in Mary’s mother’s place and, holding in my hands the pitiful little journal where she described burying one child after another, acknowledge that our life was not so bad. Our boy was still out there. We had hope.

I finished the book. It took some courage to show it to my son, but I knew I had to. His response – typically generous and imaginative – is described at the end. A writer and a musician too, he understands that you write what you have to write. What he probably doesn’t understand is my impulse to share our experience with other parents. But for me that has become paramount. Not nearly enough is known or understood about skunk. There were times when we thought we were going mad. When other parents shared their (identical) experiences with us, it proved a lifelineBack to that thorny question of how far it is acceptable to use personal pain and family trauma as fuel for fiction.

Julie Myerson's The Lost Child has recently attracted a great deal of controversy (e.g.), and the publisher has now brought forward the publication date to take advantage of the tide of outrage it has created. Minette Marrin in The Sunday Times said it was :

... a betrayal not just of love and intimacy, but also of motherhood itself ...

(And don't you just love Marrin's first line? :

A family into which a writer is born is a ruined family.)

In the book Myerson (who was longlisted for the Booker in 2003) details her painful relationship with her son, Jake, and her decision to change the locks on the family home because of his use of skunk cannabis (apparently a genetically modified version and up to 30 times stronger than the usual stuff). To get an idea of just what she had to contend with, take a look at this extract from the book and this piece from The Telegraph. Another extract, which I lifted the quote above from, can be found here. (Am I the only one reminded of Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin?)

Jake Myerson, who now works in the music industry, sees matters in a very different light and told reporters :

What she has done has taken the very worst years of my life and cleverly blended it into a work of art, and that to me is obscene. I was only 17, I was a confused teenager, I was too young really to know who I was or what was happening. What she describes in her book are a series of incidents, it's not who I am and I find it very sad that she feels the need to tar me with the 'drug addict' brush. She's been writing about me since I was two, and, quite frankly, I'm not surprised by anything she does any more. She's a writer and like a lot of writers she is wrapped up in her own world - even if the worlds they are creating aren't quite true, they become true to them anyway, and I wasn't prepared to let her world colour mine any more.

Anyway, this is all excellent publicity for the book ... just when we thought the market for misery memoirs was shrinking!

Worth reading is Charlotte Northedge's in The Guardian piece on the fallout of miserylit for the author's nearest and dearest. (Star readers will spot that the piece was reproduced in today's edition.)

Postscript :

Worth reading too is Geoffrey Myerson's account.

An interesting point from Neill Denny in The Bookseller :

The important overall point for the wider book trade is that the episode has served to underline the primacy of the book in our media hierachy. Would Myerson's revelations have counted for so much had they been expressed through any other media? A book confers a status and finality on a story that even now news­papers, television, the internet, radio—you name it—can only dream of. Remember that the next time you hear some media pundit glibly predicting the death of the book.

Things Turn Ugly for Constance Bristow

Readers of this blog will know that truth vs fiction in memoir writing is a topic that has come up again and again over the past year or so, as the demand for stories depicting (particularly miserable) real life experience has grown.

Now things have turned ugly (if you will forgive the pun) for Constance Briscoe who is being sued by her mother over allegations of physical and emotional abuse made in her memoir.

Mrs. Briscoe has called her daughter, who is one of Britain's first black female judges, a "wicked thief and a liar" and told the court that she had forged documents for her defence. Briscoe admits she made some mistakes with the details in her book, but stands by the substance of her allegations. The case continues.

You can watch an interview with Briscoe on Sky Television's The Book Show :



Postscript :

On the Guardian blog Alison Flood asks whether this is the end of the "misery memoir".

Another Postscript :

Briscoe breaks down as she gives evidence and tells how she attempted suicide by drinking bleach, because of her mother's cruelty.

More on Dodgy Memoirs

There's more discussion in the papers on those dodgy memoirs.

Andy McSmith in the Independent doesn't have much sympathy for Margaret Jones' publishers :

An unkind reaction might be that the world of publishing has been asking to be taken for a ride by someone like Margaret Seltzer for a very long time. Ever since McCourt won the Pulitzer Prize more than 10 years ago for his childhood memoir Angela's Ashes, the doors of publishing houses have swung open to more and more people with personal stories to tell about bad things that happened to them when they were young. ... This genre is booming as other aspects of publishing are struggling, and now have spawned three sub-genres – memoirs you can rely on, memoirs that are a bit dodgy but still a good read, and memoirs that are a pack of lies.

Wouldn't it be nice to see these on separate shelves in the bookshops, or some sort of coding system so readers know where they stand?

If all this talk about bogus misery memoirs has got you thinking that you might quite like to write one of your own (and hey, I'm sure that in Malaysia you'd stand a pretty good chance of getting away with it!) John Crace in the Guardian offers us an excellent how-to guide to the genre.

Now then, did you know that Heath Ledger kept a diary which is about to be published?

Well .... actually he didn't. The Last Days of Heath Ledger to be published in Esquire magazine is a fictional account of the actors last days in London and New York.

Tim Arango in the New York Times isn't too taken with the idea:

You are losing the veracity of journalism, and you are losing the imaginative license of fiction. You run the risk of ending up with something that is neither true nor interesting.

The same could be said for all those bogus misery memoirs, couldn't it?