Terence Blacker: Writers should spare their families

Such has been the level of emotional sharing over the past few days that merely reading a newspaper or watching the TV news has become an exhausting experience. There have been daily reports of the dying days of Jade Goody. Moving accounts of living with a handicapped child have been published. And this weekend the writer Julie Myerson explained why she has written an account of how her 17 year-old son became so out of control as a result of drug use that she and her husband severed ties with him, locking him out of the house.

On the face of it, Myerson's book The Lost Child is at the respectable end of intimate disclosure. It is a hardback written by a talented and interesting writer. It will be reviewed in all the right places. Not the slightest trace of tabloid vulgarity attends it.

All the same, there is something distinctly off-kilter and disquieting about the project. Jonathan and Julie Myerson, both successful writers, have three children, the oldest of whom became dependant on cannabis in his teens. He dropped out of school, was abusive and occasionally violent. The Myersons told him that, if his behaviour continued, he would have to leave home. That, just after he turned 17, is what the boy did. The Myersons changed the locks on the family home. He was taken in by a friend's parents and has not returned.

In interviews over the past year, Julie Myerson has referred to the terrible time she was having with her drug-taking son – it was partly what had directed her to write her last novel, she told The Independent last February. Now this account of the whole sad business, interwoven with the book she had been writing when it all happened, is to be published in May.

It will sell well. There is a hunger for unhappiness which was first tapped by the profitable market in lurid, clammy accounts of abusive childhoods. The Myersons believe – honestly, no doubt – that the most pressing reason for revealing their family secrets is to help others. "When we were in our darkest, deadliest hour, it would have been helpful to have read a book like this," Julie Myerson has said.

Sometimes authors inhabit a parallel universe in which the written world becomes confused with the actual one. They fictionalise and distance real people, and real feelings. They forget that books stay around. It is not just that words, read and re-read, have the power to hurt, but that wounds which otherwise would have healed remain open.

The whole Myerson family deserve sympathy but it is undeniable that, out of their shared misery, one of them has emerged with a book which will advance her career. Another, still in his teens and unable to present his version because he happens not to be a published writer, will be helped not one jot by his story being made public. Indeed, pinned down on paper, he will find it hard to move out of the teenage hellhole in which he has found himself.

Authors exploit those around them but until recently have done it through fiction, a medium which allows them a resolution and leaves their subjects with some sort of dignity. That has become old-fashioned. We prefer our reality straight, claiming that it is more honest, less slanted.

It is not. It merely causes more pain.

terblacker@aol.com

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