Saturday, March 07, 2009
An Apology
My apologies: I took from Alexander Chancellor's article yesterday that Julie Myerson's new book The Lost Child was a novel. It's not in fact - it's even subtitled A True Story, I discover. This raises different and even more urgent issues, of course, about the morality of such memoirs, which, bogged down with script-reading, article-writing etc I'm afraid I don't have time to tackle just now. However there's a sensible-looking article about them in today's Guardian (which I also havent yet had time to read) by Ian Jack, once editor of the great journal of reportage, Granta.
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4 comments:
hey eliz, alexander chancellor refers three times to myerson's 'new novel', so it should be him that is apologising not you! the ian jack article is more illuminating.
Well, it's all a bit confused, I think, Nasim mainly I suppose because it's not published yet. There's another article in yesterday's Observer which assumes it's a novel, but of course Ian Jack had read the proof.
And many will have their knives out without even having read it! A lot of the anger towards JM also seems to come from her throwing her boy out, but in my opinion that is her business, and I reckon it would have been hell for her. It is too easy to smugly judge other families and how they cope with crises. Whether she should have magnified the whole painful episode in a memoir is of course another question. I do think she could have minimised damage by writing the book as fiction if she absolutely had to write about it. From what I have gleaned the story involving her son is much more compelling than the other strand about Mary Yelloly, but maybe she needed Mary as a device to 'allow' her to write about her son? I feel I can't say anything about the actual book as I haven't read it, and I am unlikely to, I am not a huge fan of her books, though I enjoy her on Late Review. But I'm sure there will be many columnists offering up their opinions til it all dies down and they move on to something else.
Good points, Nasim.
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