JULIE MYERSON WAS BRAVE TO WRITE ABOUT HER SON. I KNOW ABOUT THESE TRAUMAS

Last week the Observer revealed Julie Myerson's plans to publish a
novel based on her rift with her skunk-smoking son. Alexander
Linklater welcomes her honesty as he recalls the troubled legacy that
a banishment left in his own family

Alexander Linklater The Observer Twenty-three years ago on a midweek
day at 4am, my 15-year-old brother, Saul, was arrested while running
wild through the West End of London in the throes of a full-blown
manic psychosis. He was raving, unsleeping and had no idea what was
happening. He hadn't committed a serious crime, so the police
released him and our parents picked up the pieces. Among other
things, this meant dealing with an elemental rage in their younger
son; a rage that, when it had direction, seemed to be directed
principally at his mum.

My brother had been ill - psychotically depressed, then psychotically
manic - for more than a year. Our social-worker mother, trained on
the frontlines of family breakdown, finally couldn't cope with the
verbal abuse, threats and raw, animal fury from her own child. When
he wasn't on the streets he was going mad in the house. She was both
helpless to control him and helpless to help him.

The legal instruments of the Mental Health Act, which allow
psychiatrists to lock people up for indeterminate periods - even if
no crime has been committed - are the most authoritarian in British
statute. These are the powers my parents invoked to get my brother
sectioned for the first time. They tricked him into a car and drove
him to a hospital. When he saw - quite literally - the men in white
coats coming for him, he made a run for it. Even if psychotic, he was
still my quick-witted brother. As nurses wrestled him to the ground
and my journalist father looked on, Saul bellowed: "This is an
outrage! Where's the press?"

Should I now be repeating this story in print? It was one in a litany
of incidents that tore at the fabric of our family. Though we may
suspect, we do not know how much dope played a role in the
development of my brother's condition - whether causal or
contributory. It may be risky to speculate, and unseemly to expose
ourselves in public. Readers of this have only my version of events
to go on. Neither I, nor he, could now tell you what Saul - a name to
which he no longer answers - thought he was angry about at that time.
And I can scarcely begin to articulate how excruciating and
complicated it is to make the kind of decisions our parents made to
get their teenage boy locked up.

The press has been luridly available in the case of novelist Julie
Myerson and her decision to write the story of how she and her
husband locked their then 17-year-old son, Jake, out of the family
home because of abusive behaviour arising partly from his skunk
habit. Though none of the commentators had initially read the book,
The Lost Child, in which Myerson presents her account, a taboo of
motherhood seemed to have been punctured, releasing the whiff of a
sulphurous fairytale. Myerson has been characterised as a fey, vain,
haughty queen of the chattering classes who banished, and then
exploited, her unfortunate, wayward son.

Jake, now 20, has also had his say, taking his share of the media
spotlight (and monetary rewards) to describe his mother as insane,
and to claim that he had asked her not to go ahead with publication.
As one columnist squawked: "What sort of a mother would ignore her
son's pleas, then go ahead to publish and damn her firstborn for ever
. while she capitalised on the situation and furthered her literary
career in the process?"

Given the opportunity, my 15-year old brother might well have done
the same as Jake, and relished the response - though he would not
relish it now. When it comes to such complex and emotive family
scenarios, everyone risks descending into the inchoate and the
contradictory. An article by that same commentator had appeared only
a few weeks earlier under the fuming headline: "It's never right for
a parent to protect their criminal child."

I met Julie Myerson at the end of last year, and we talked about
cannabis. With only a vague intimation of trouble to come, she
offered to send me a proof copy of The Lost Child. On reading it, I
felt a powerful surge of recognition. It's a strangely constructed
account that flashes back and forward between one story she is
researching - about a watercolour painter in Regency England called
Mary Yelloly, who dies young, leaving a sad flash of brilliance in
her wake - and the other story that has been unfolding in Myerson's own home.

Unsurprisingly, it is the personal narrative that is most gripping,
and the temptation is to dismiss the "literary device", skim the
historical material and jump forward to find out what is happening to
the author and her son. But towards the end there is a merging of
what is happening in Myerson's imaginary life and her real life that
lends a haunting substance to both. We began an email exchange,
initially on the subject of teenage drug use.

Last year, in the pages of the Observer, Professor Colin Blakemore
had downplayed a large swath of research into the links between
marijuana use and psychiatric disorders, declaring the results to be
"in the realm of correlation rather than causation". It was a nearly
meaningless remark. There is no definitive cause yet identified for
any single psychiatric illness. What matters is the strength of those
correlations and the way they lend academic weight to what
psychiatrists know as a routine clinical reality: that cannabis is a
major problem for their patients, whether causal or contributory.

Discussing this with Myerson, it was clear that Jake wasn't, in any
conventional sense, psychiatrically ill. Nor had she and her husband,
Jonathan, had to go as far as my parents had with my brother. Theirs
is not an aberrant story. Barring the fact that she is a writer, with
an audience, it is a relatively ordinary tale of middle-class family
breakdown. But that was precisely what I found gripping. What skunk
can do, while providing brief glimpses of a magical escape for the
user, is to transform ordinarily difficult relationships into
pathological ones.

The fact that my brother was suffering from an acute psychiatric
illness did not mean that the dynamics of family relationships
disappeared, only that they came to operate at a wildly intensified
level of distortion and fear. The relationship of a mother to her son
is not one that, even in a happy and stable family, functions
according to the laws of reason. In both love and in anger, it is
instinctual and inchoate. If you throw petrol on the hot embers of
adolescence, in the form of psychotropic substances, don't be
surprised if the results are explosive.

Commentators eager to play up the act of violation represented by a
mother locking out her child appear not to have been curious about
the sequence of trials and separations that preceded Jake's final
exile. What, for example, of the punch that Jake landed on his
mother, which perforated her eardrum? I thought long and hard about
this, because, while my brother has in the past physically assaulted
both my father and myself, he has never - even at his most floridly
psychotic and verbally abusive - laid a finger on our mother. I am
not presenting Jake's single punch to his mother's face as a
counter-violation, merely as a stinging reminder that families rarely
provide simple morality tales.

Jake Myerson has found that the press was available to him. The
papers have provided him with a megaphone nearly as loud as his
mother's (though he is no doubt now discovering that what he says to
an interviewer sounds very different when it appears in print). He
has claimed he asked her not to publish the book. Yet, in The Lost
Child, Myerson prints a sequence of his poems, and Jake accepted a
fee of UKP 1,000 to allow her to do so. He is not a voiceless
character in his mother's literary fantasy. He is his own actor, with
his own volition, capable of landing his own punches and operating
according to the same negotiations of print and payment.

If this is deemed to be a story that should not be told because it is
too risky for those involved, we shouldn't pretend to be serious
about describing the difficulties of family life at all. I would
attest, on behalf of my own mother, that when you've gone far enough
down such a road of existential confrontation, a taunting from the
community is less important than facing the reality, and that telling
the story may be all that you can do.

This is not to reverse the fairytale, and argue that Jake is the
twisted villain, and his mother the long-suffering saint. The book
gives a painfully beautiful account of love between a mother and son
that, while tormented and fractured, most likely can't be completely broken.

My brother was 30 before he came to have real insight into what had
happened to him. That year, he changed his name to mark the occasion
when he began to take full responsibility for his own treatment and
adulthood. Jake has a long road to travel, and will change his
judgments many times along the way. But his own words, written as a
teenager and published by his mother in her book, probably contain
the deepest truth:

When you've finished painting me in red and black, To suit your
fiction, lies and facts .. you can race to find the man Who always
was, and still is, your son.