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JULIE MYERSON
As featured in The Independent, March 2009
Because we are writing a book on teenagers we have taken a great interest in the “Julie Myerson case”.
This is a strange situation for the author to find herself; the oxygen of publicity surrounding her novel suffocating and strangling her family. Was it intended or did it all get out of hand? Is “The Lost Child” a (de facto) bestseller but with too high a price?
A writer should not be blamed for fictionalising her story, however lightly; although I think what is critical in this case is the timing. It would have been wiser for her to have recorded her experience and her agony but then sat on the material for several years before turning it into a book.
Nineteen year old boys are un-worked clay. They are forever testing the water, getting into scrapes, over-reaching themselves, causing havoc; in other words working out their own value systems and learning by mistakes and losses, just as we all did.
Teenagers hate to be corralled or manipulated. (Witness Bristol Palin’s nineteen year old boyfriend who has just done a bunk). They see straight through therapy-speak. In these situations they just look for the exit, in some way or another.
It is too early to tell how things will turn out. What is almost a dead cert is that during his twenties Jake will have more adventures and some of these will turn out to be good.
What Julie has done by creating infamy around her son has made it impossible for him to creep back under cover of darkness without loss of face.
By going public so soon she has created a fissure unlikely to heal.
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