Moms who blog come under fire, constantly, for "oversharing." Whether it's "no one wants to hear about that" or "your kid would be mortified if he knew you were telling that," there's no shortage of folks eager to tell those women to shut up already. One of the arguments I often hear hurled back in response is that women have been writing about their children for years and years, and how is blogging about them different from writing about them in a book?

Isn't the sharing of our personal experiences necessarily going to include at least some of our children's stories, as well, and hasn't that always been the way in one medium or another? Why was it okay for Erma Bombeck to write about how rotten her kids were, but it's not okay for bloggers? What's all the fuss?

I still think there are folks who jump into this melee in a manner that's more alarmist than thoughtful, but -- not surprisingly -- there's always a cautionary tale to be found.

Meet Julie Myerson. Myerson is a British author known for various writings, perhaps most notably a long-running newspaper column she wrote about her kids. And now she has an extremely controversial book out, "The Lost Child," detailing her son's supposed addiction to marijuana. Myerson's son is only 20 at this point, and he's speaking out against his mother's version of events, and indeed her long-standing history of using her children for writing fodder in ways which were painful to them.

Salon's Amy Benfer asks, Is it ever okay to tar your kid in print? She shares this when detailing the subterfuge that surrounded Myerson's newspaper column:

According to Jake, he first asked his mother if she was the author around Episode 6. She said, "No, of course not." He asked again a year later, after he'd been kicked out of the house. "She promised she would never do that to us," he says. After that, again, according to him, she actually concocted a story about "some underhanded journalist" who must be secretly writing the column while using details of her own family and even "made a few calls" claiming to "investigate" this mysterious person.

If true, this is fucking bonkers, right? It's one thing to write about your children upfront, yet another to write about your kids under the cloak of anonymity, and something else entirely to write about your kids in a way they most certainly recognize, then claim they are the crazy ones and invent some weird cloak and dagger shit to explain it all. Myerson finally gave up the column, explaining that it "began to feel less like some kind of benign, semi-comic revenge and more like a betrayal." Anyone else wondering where to draw the line between using your position as a writer to exact "semi-comic revenge" on your children for committing the sin of being surly teenagers and "betraying" them?

Much of the back-and-forth I'm reading online centers on the issue of whether a marijuana addiction is physiologically possible, and I'm here to tell you that I don't know and I don't care. That's not the issue. That's so not the issue. To my mind, the issue began with the newspaper column. It began with the lying. The fact that this woman then went ahead and wrote a book that essentially ruined her (young) son's reputation is the final, ballsy, icing on the crap cake. But the book, even, is not the issue.

The issue is what responsibility we bear to our children when we share our families with the world.

Myerson is not unique in writing about her family; far from it. What's distinctive about her writing is the seemingly calculating coldness and undertones of revenge she embraces while doing so. Myerson is unapologetic about what she says, why she said it, and -- I'll admit, this is the kicker, for me -- the dishonesty with her kids while she was doing it.

Jezebel's Anna N. is willing to see both sides of this drama, but still can't condone Myerson's actions:

Jake himself is very young and not exactly restrained — he talks about his siblings, one of whom is still a minor, and says his parents should have gotten a divorce — and it's hard to believe his side of the story is the unalloyed truth. The image he paints (with eager assists by the Daily Mail) of Julie Myerson as unrepentant fame-whore is probably oversimplified. That said, Myerson does sound like a piece of work.[...]

[D]oes "the importance of publicizing the nightmare of teenage drug use" — the justification Myerson and her husband use for publishing The Lost Child — really outweigh a young man's desire to keep his painful adolescence private? In the Times, Susan Cheever basically says: totally! Author of two addiction memoirs, one of which describes her assignations with two men while her daughter was sick, she explains, "I strongly believe everybody has the right to their own story." But everyone's story includes other people's, and artistic autonomy becomes a lot less admirable when those people are your children.

The New York Times Room for Debate Blog asked four writers to weigh in on this issue, and Melanie Gideon's boundaries are very clear:

I made a conscious decision when writing my book that it would not be a tell-all memoir. I wasn’t interested in airing my family’s dirty laundry because I was interested in still having a family when the book was published.

My young son appears regularly in my memoir. Some might say he plays a major role. He is wise and kind and in many ways carries the soul of the book. He never whines or spends hours in front of the computer — at least not on the page. That is the beauty of the tell-some memoir.

Personally, I find Gideon's reasoning a bit too simplistic, though I admire and applaud the sentiment behind it. For me, as a reader, I'm not all that interested in the kid who never whines. He's 1-dimensional. While I agree to the premise of the tell-some memoir, I can also think of half a dozen instances where "tell-some" equated to "tell so little I lost interest." (Please note, I haven't read Gideon's memoir. Just pointing out that sometimes sanitization of a story can render it a bit flat.)

A similar approach, though somewhat more complex and reasoned, comes from Kate Hopper at Mother Words, retelling some bits from a recent interview she gave:

There’s an ethical dilemma in being a parent and a writer of realistic fiction (or nonfiction), that is, a person whose real life and relationships can be a starting point for creative work. When your children are very young, you’re free to comment on their behavior—as well as your own parenting skills—in their presence; as they get older, they don’t want to be the subjects even of positive conversation (“Look how she’s grown!”).

She goes on to say:

I think my kids understand what are for me the two enormous truths of this parenting/writing experience: 1) I love my children wildly, unreservedly, and 2) I can’t live my life without writing things down.

It is this last bit that changes things for me. Look; I come at this topic from a position of extreme bias -- I write about my kids all the time. Obviously I believe it can be done thoughtfully, responsibly, and in a way that's not unhealthy. In my opinion, Hopper has explained the most important ingredient for a writer's ability to write about her children without doing damage: Unconditional, wild, obvious-to-everyone love and adoration.

This should be self-evident, no?

I happen to think it's okay to say less-than-glowing things about your children, sometimes, provided that 1) it's the exception rather than the rule, and 2) it would be impossible to read your words without it being overwhelmingly obvious that you are wildly in love with your subject.

The argument can be made that children play a part in our personal stories, and we can share them in that context and occasionally find them challenging or irritating and say so and it won't damage them that we shared that. It can be done. I know it can because hundreds (thousands?) of writers have successfully walked this line ahead of me and Myerson and everyone else. Can it be tricky? Absolutely. But can it be done? Yes, I believe it can.

When the love is uncertain -- or when trust is absent, as I think the story of Myerson lying to her children about her column demonstrates -- this balancing act falls down. Venting about a child in that circumstance offers only embarrassment and hurt, without the cushion of adoration to balance out the less savory bits.

Katy Murr writes that Myerson should've said no:

Whether she should have said No to him, and kicked him out, I don’t know. I do, however, stamp my heel in the mud firmly in saying that she should have said no to the book. Write it, if you want, if it makes you feel better. But don’t publish it yet, when someone else is trying to live his life, and will have this following him around for a significant amount of time.

What does she hope to achieve? To alienate her son further? To earn more money? To hope that people will read, and think, ‘how brave, how wonderful that she’s told intimate, personal stories about her son’?

I still believe that writers can share about their children in thoughtful, enlightening, and non-hurtful ways, without stripping out all the reality and leaving just a veneer of harmony and perfection. But Julie Myerson's story appears to be a pretty illustrative cautionary tale of how not to do it.

BlogHer Contributing Editor Mir also blogs about issues parental and otherwise at Woulda Coulda Shoulda, and about the joys of mindful retail therapy at Want Not.