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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
