First of all, I must tell you – but shush, don’t tell anyone, I really don’t want anyone to know it but you but…MY SON HAS A DRUG PROBLEM! Yes! He does! And if you buy and read my new book LOST AND FOUND by ME – not I mean, really remember this book LOST AND FOUND by ME – you will find out all about it and I know now that you are all going to buy it in your gazillions because I am going to be EVERYWHERE talking about it and you will be intrigued and amazed and…
OK. I’m lying. My new book LOST AND FOUND by LUCY CAVENDISH is not about drugs. None of my children are drug addicts, unless Calpol counts, and they all seem totally fine given a lack of ability to read in my six year-old and the strange skin problems my four year old has all the time. I haven’t written a story of a poor Victorian DRUG USER JUST LIKE MY SON but a tale of a mother and three children and a drowning and Black Beauty and a dog being run over (she survives! Do not fear) and a nudist and a disturbed girl and an old friend who reappears. Oh and there’s also SHOPPING in it and a friend who becomes one of those colour consultants who tells you if you are autumn or winter.
Anyway, from the end of March this book that isn’t about drugs will be in the shops and at Amazon so please buy a copy and please, please enjoy it because I really hope you do.
Right. Well, now that’s done with, we can get on to the Julie Myerson saga because I have found it riveting. I can almost not read enough about it. I find her with all her blonde hair and rather full lips, slightly intriguing. I don’t know her. I was about to say I wouldn’t know her if she sat next to me on the train but I would now because I have seen her face EVERYWHERE! I have tried to analyse why I have found the whole saga so compelling. Is it because I feel she has done something wrong? Is it because she has written about it? Or maybe it is because I have at least two friends who have been in exactly the same situation as Myerson and dealt with it entirely differently.
My friend C has a daughter of now 23. When her daughter H was a teenager and they were living in London, H started smoking piles of dope. She went from being a charming young adult in to a wreck. According to C, she became rude, irresponsible, unresponsive to offers of help. She became delusional, suicidal. She had periods of her life when she was hallucinating for hours on end. C was in despair and would tell me, at length, how terrible H was behaving.
It all came to a head one day when H threatened her mother with a knife and then, so angry at everything, bashed the door of her North London house down and fled out in to the night. C called me in tears. I finally snapped and told her that she has to chuck H out. ‘You have the right to a life!’ I said. ‘Why should you be threatened in your own house? It’s appalling.’
C then told me that she was going to pay for rent on a bedsit so H could move out.
‘No!’ I yelled. ‘Stop funding her!’
I truly believed I was right in what I said.
The next day H came back and on and on the saga went with H refusing to move out and smoking more dope and C feeling sad, scared, bewildered, terrified and, most of all, torn apart. This was her daughter who she loved so very much. C could not believe how her daughter had changed.
Eventually the violence got worse. My conversations with C got worse. Why was she cooking for H? I demanded of her. Why was she still giving her an allowance? Why didn’t she pack her off to uni? C wouldn’t move on inch though.
‘She is my daughter,’ she said. ‘I have to support her.’
I told her she was wrong.
H is now 25. She has a wonderful job. She gets paid £40k a year. It took forever but, eventually, she came out of her hole and kicked the drugs. She now has a flat, a cat, a lovely boyfriend and, do you know what else? She weeps when she reads of this Myerson boy. H told me the other day that if her mother hadn’t stuck by her and continued to raise her and love her and put up with her despite her most appalling behaviour, she think she would have killed herself.
C was right and I was wrong.
That doesn’t mean to say that Julie Myerson is wrong. Every family is different. We all think differently and have a different dynamic that lies underneath the surface. H didn’t have younger siblings to peddle drugs to. C only had to balance H, not everyone else around her.
But I have another friend who had a similar problem with her eldest son. He became, as he liked to put it, a ‘nihilist’. He sat in a darkened room smoking dope day in, day out. All his talent and joy of life ebbed from him. He split up with his kind and devoted girlfriend. He gave up a place at Oxford University. He broke my friend’s heart and yet still there she was ferrying him chicken casseroles and stuffing a tenner in his wallet, even though she knew exactly what he’d spend it on.
But he’s come really good now too. My friend is delighted. He texts her to tell her how much he loves her, how good she was to him, how she pulled him through.
I don’t know what I’d do. I haven’t had to deal with it. I probably will at some point. I always thought I’d go down the Tough Love route. I do believe there is a point where your own personal happiness is as important as that of your children. But I do know something now – my friends really battled hard. They put their heads down and refused to give up on their children despite the vitriol and flak that came their way. C cannot believe what the Myersons have done, Steam comes from her ears when she talks about them. She finds it particularly offensive that Julie M has written a book about it and therefore exposed her son to the type of publicity that is hard to deal with when you are 20 years old and a regular drug user.
All I can think is, there for the grace of God go I.
Lost and Found by Lucy Cavendish (Penguin) is out from March 26th and please buy it otherwise I may well disappear in to a drugs induced hell myself which is something I plan to do as a granny anyway but was not intending to indulge in right now
I think Julie Myerson is a complete cow. She has traded in love, humanity and compassion for fame and fortune. I only hope one of her family writes a horrible book, in the cruellest fashion, about all her bad habits and vices. Her defence, that as a writer, she is consummed by an urgency to write with no holds barred, is complete bollocks. There are a million stories in the world. To have chosen to air her son’s diry laundry in a book is vile.
Good luck with yours, BTW. It’s over 2 years since you were finishing in Spain. Remember?
Polly x
Hi Samantha, Haven’t had time to read your blog for a while due to the dreaded Baby Gloomer syndrome happening upon me (mother fell and broke pelvis in Spain, father and his dementia had to be put in a home, twin grandchildren to care for while daughter works, own job to hold down - not a lot of hair left on my head!) Anyway, what I wanted to say was that I commented on London Time Out about the Julie Myerson tale because my own novel, A Painful Post Mortem, is on the same subject - daughter’s drug addiction - and I wanted to canvass opinion from readers to see if they ever think it okay for a mother to write in such a way about her child.
Bit different in my case because tough love brought my daughter round and she kicked a 13 year heroin addiction. She was so cock-a-hoop, she wanted to shout it from the roof tops (wanted me to write a book) so, five years later, we collaborated on a magazine article in Woman’s Own, I think it was. Within weeks she was dead - victim, I think, of would-be dealers who spiked her drink with a single Morphine tablet, causing her to vomit and asphyxiate. She left an 18mth old. Hence my caution in writing the story now (years later) as a novel. And hence my aversion to making money out of the venture. ALL proceeds are for charities - educating youngsters about the dangers of drugs, and a project in 3rd world among HIV+ mothers and babies.
Back to my comment on London Time Out. Wow! Did I get a response. Some person who called me a ’self-publicising vulture’ whose only charity was my own pocket. Boy did it hurt! Days later, when I was over the worst, I wrote a very! very! very! gracious comment back putting the lady right. Because - like you - I want my book to become the next best thing to The Shack - or to Julie Myerson’s book. But not for my sake. But because it makes me cry to see how half the kids in the privileged Western world chuck away their prospects on a self-destruction spree; and the other half in the 3rd world never get a chance. Anything you can do to help promote my book (Tweeting - anything) would be an enormous help. BTW - can we connect on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook?
My God Mel - I can’t believe it! How difficult and painful and yes I am on Facebook but not Twitter and I am going to order your book now. What a terrible thing to have happened. I think it’s very different writing a novel now with proceeds going to charity and I agree with you re kids chucking away everything on a self-destructive spree. There has been a similar incident in my family - a member of my extended family who had such promised died of ‘one last fix’ and another one ended up schizophrenic and on the streets of London and he too now is dead….THAT is what people need to know - their children can die of this and it is so so tragic. You seem to have been having a hard time with Baby Gloomer. I will do whatever I can to promote the book and look and look forward to reading it…
Re Polly - yes, surely JM should be giving money to charity but yes there are a million stories in the world - are you living one right now in S America? Miss you x
Lucy
I don’t think Julie Myerson should give money to charity - just shut up! I can’t bear her actually, drug addict son or no. Her flakiness, her upper-class accent, her self-absorption..
I’ve just flown into Buenos Aires from Patagonia - which was breathtaking beautiful but very expensive and rammed full of tourists. Still I went trekking on a glaciar and down the Beagle Channel to see penguins - read my blog sweetlifesouthamerica to find out the full story. I’ll try and visit in the summer when I’m in the UK, between South America and Spain, just as long as there’s more than cabbage soup and water on offer. Delish red wine in Argentina BTW, but I think you know that.. xxxx Polly