The troubled teen who found that his mother's professional ambitions outranked any loyalty she had towards him
Julie Meyerson, who laid bare the life of her son Jake in her new book The Lost Child
Saturday March 14 2009
I miss Tony Soprano. How's he doin' out there in fantasy land? Geez, Tony, you're some dude. Deals go bust, minions lose you millions but only one thing does your head in. Your kids.
Kids are messing with the heads of London's dinner party circuit since writer Julie Myerson 'fessed up to evicting teenage son Jake, her eldest child.
Soon-to-be-published The Lost Child elaborates her 'traumatic' experiences when the son supposed to go to Oxford turned into a ganga-smoking, back-chatting 'addict' who she says was ruining their family life.
Mum's in the Times, dad Jonathan is in the Guardian and Jake's trying to defend himself in The Mail. The Telegraph's using them to debate parenting, so all Britain is getting involved.
Mum says she's amazed she got a mention in the tabloids -- her and another million or so dysfunctional families with upset teenagers -- but of course the difference is that she's relatively posh while the rest live in council estates.
Mum's angle is that she's doing society a service in speaking the unspeakable about rearing teenagers.
A rather sympathetic interviewer wrote of Myerson 'tremulously raking her pale golden hair' (formerly brunette), with a picture showing her against a sad-looking Madonna statue in the background. See how mothers suffer, poor us.
The cringe-making prose catapulted debates on tough love into the features pages, with Myerson also 'fessing to penning a Guardian column which for years gave the inside track on her three kids, without them knowing or consenting.
Hardly up to the Guardian's usual ethical standards but, hey, they weren't targeting the children's market. Editors pulled it and deleted back issues from the on-line archive.
Where are you, Tony? Remember when Meadow was dating that Jewish boy or the disasters round AJ when he started behaving like, well, a spoilt brat?
The Myerson family saga is an Upstairs, Upstairs tale of two writers, three kids, city and country homes and an appetite for drama.
Dad makes plays and is a magistrate. Mum makes books, columns and appears on TV with leading members of the culture commentariat.
Eager as she is to be truthful, Mum didn't spill the beans on her personal difficulties with Dad, which Jake (20) says propelled him into misery. It's not part of her official story but it is part of Jake's.
"My parents didn't separate, but perhaps it might have been better if they had, because everything which has happened now is, in my eyes, a by-product of trying to keep things together," Jake says.
"When you need to pretend things are still idyllic it becomes a form of self-denial, and when the facts don't fit, you try to make them fit, and I ended up on the outside."
Jake can believe his mother wrote about him but wishes she hadn't. "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," he believes. "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."
Tangents veer into wondering if you can be addicted to cannabis or how much harm it does to a developing brain (not usually tho' it happens/can propel you into schizophrenia). But Tony, doncha think, if you're fighting with your partner and your eldest child chooses to be 'out of it', you're a dummy if you don't join the dots.
Would you, could you kick your troubled teen out for, well, being troubled? Troubled as in not a psychiatric case but disruptive enough to cause you anguish? The culture stigmatises teenagers especially and soaks up stories of sex, drugs, rock and roll, as though no older generation ever indulged.
Teenagers are among the most isolated age groups around. They're between lives -- comfy time as a child and the precipice into adulthood. Bringing up a baby is trying, but discreetly holding onto a son or daughter through adolescence teaches you what parenting is all about. And it's terrifying because it's almost your last chance to get things right-ish.
A full fridge and parents who listen while pretending to be doing something else, preferably domestic, tends to work. But what about Jake?
Eldest children bear the brunt of their parents' experiment in being parents -- supposed to look after siblings, raise the family flag a few notches and emerge as brain surgeons/multi-millionaires/ sensible members of society.
Jake didn't, yet. He catapulted himself out of the glittering image stakes only to find that his mother's professional ambitions outranked any loyalty she had for him.
Meanwhile, his parents' relationship seems to have grown stronger because he united them in disappointment. Dad is currently defending Mum in the broadsheets.
Jake lost his privacy, his need to make mistakes in his own way and have a safe home to return to.
He didn't keep Mum's rules, and should have, but at what cost? Myerson is no Jade Goody, yet there's a Jade effect in her brand of reality writing. Jade, bless her, wins the honesty stakes.
- Medb Ruane
