Book review: The Lost Child: A true story

Published on Thursday 19 March 2009 10:34

by Julie Myerson Bloomsbury, 336pp, £14.99 Review by CLAIRE HARMAN

YOU HAVE TO ADMIRE JULIE Myerson's professionalism. There she is, burdened with awful material, trying to make sense of it, trying to honour her side of the bargain. If the telling is a bit rough, if her voice cracks every now and then, that is forgivable. It's a mark of almost superhuman doggedness that she managed to get some of this down on paper at all.

And that's just the "core" story of The Lost Child, the history of an early 19th-century amateur watercolourist, Mary Yelloly, possibly the most content-less life ever attempted by a biographer.

Myerson's agent saw an album of domestic scenes painted by the girl, thought the novelist should research the life, and signed her up. A couple of years on, Myerson had discovered little more about Yelloly than that she owned a pair of dangly earrings. Meanwhile, the author's own life was producing far more urgent copy. Myerson and her husband had just ejected Jake, their eldest child, from the house in a desperate response to what she has characterised as his aggressive skunk-fuelled behaviour.

By her account, "our boy" started to skip school, steal from his parents, shoplift, lie and cause violent scenes. When it became clear that, in her view, he was addicted to skunk, and was possibly endangering his younger brother, the parents panicked and have been basically at war with their child ever since, chucking him out, taking him back, offering and withholding privileges, trying to strike deals, trying to get him professional help.

It sounds like a nightmare, and one understands why Myerson would have been too distraught to do much with the book on Mary Yelloly – even had that project been worthwhile. As it was, The Lost Child morphed into a narrative incorporating her own parenting miseries and childhood memories into the limp biographical quest.

The results have been more dramatic than Myerson could ever have imagined. Two months before the planned publication, articles have begun to appear under headlines such as "Author Sells Son's Story", pillorying Myerson for betraying her child's trust, for betraying motherhood itself.

People have been outraged by a mother admitting that there came a point "where it felt like he was pulling the whole family over the edge and I had an option: let everyone fall or cut the rope. And when the moment came, I was surprisingly ruthless. I just did it. I cut the rope." This isn't "tough love" (what Myerson calls it), but something much rarer and less unfashionable – Roman matron.

As Myerson has made her career out of semi-autobiographical novels of domestic life and is the author of a self-congratulatory newspaper column on "Living with teenagers", she couldn't have set herself up better as an Aunt Sally.

But her instinct to say too much about herself becomes, here, the redeeming feature. She admits freely to the relief in the house when her son has gone. She is nave but painfully honest, and there are some scenes of terrible pathos, such as when her son plays her a song on the street, the only territory they have in common any more. Her flashbacks to her own rejection by a parent at a similar age are also moving: the unwashed ashtrays at her former home, kept as a bleak shrine to abandonment by her father (later a suicide); his demands for 8 compensation from his former wife as half the price of the dog.

Back in Yelloly land, Myerson runs her finger over her subject's gravestone with a sort of imbecilic awe, pretending she is interested. Not surprisingly, she can't keep it up and has to resort to fiction, imagining long girly chats with Mary's ghost, pondering the pains and pleasures of love. I'm not inclined to forgive these sins against biography and taste, except that Myerson clearly needed a diversion from the grimly fascinating narrative of her own life.

&#149 Claire Harman's Jane's Fame: The Story of How Jane Austen Conquered the World is published next month and reviewed opposite.