A blurred reality

Accused of sharing too much, Myerson tries fiction. Sort of.

Nonfiction: A Novel Julie Myerson

Tin House

True to its coy title, Nonfiction: A Novel, wants to have it both ways. Or as author Julie Myerson said in an interview upon the book's publication in Britain in 2022: “This book is completely made up. It is also completely true.” But before we get into how that can be the case, let's look at the saga of this British author.

Of the 14 books Myerson has published since 1994, the one that started a fire was 2009's The Lost Child. On the one hand, it is a work of narrative non-fiction in which Myerson documents her obsession with Mary Yelloly, a 19th-century artist who died at age 21. Addressing Mary in the second person, Myerson recounts her tours of various locations, meetings with descendants, and encounters with family relics. Interleaved is a second narrative that records the nightmare Myerson was experiencing in real life with her son Jake (not named in the book), whom she says became addicted to skunk cannabis and was thrown out of the house, but not before he robbed his parents, gave drugs to his siblings and hit his mother so hard he punctured her eardrum.

“I'm just so sick of trying to explain this thing to people,” Myerson quotes herself as saying at one point.

One can't help but raise an eyebrow. It would be more accurate to say that Myerson has made a career out of explaining “this thing.”

In 2006, Myerson began writing a column in the Guardian called Living With Teenagers, anonymously and without her three kids' knowledge. But two years in, the identity of one kid was revealed and the children were bullied at school. The column was cancelled, removed from the internet archive — then collected in a book. Titled Living With Teenagers: One Hell of a Bumpy Ride, it became a bestseller in Britain in 2009. A storm of media infamy ensued, accusing Myerson of betraying the responsibilities of motherhood.

In the decade since, Myerson has produced three novels. Now, with Nonfiction, she's back to the topic of family and addiction. Like The Lost Child, it's an epistolary novel addressed to a dead person.

Comparing the stories in the two books, readers can suss out the “fiction” parts of Nonfiction. Here, the narrator has one child, not three, and the child is a girl, not a boy. The character does heroin, not skunk cannabis, and she overdoses and dies, while Myerson's son is alive and apparently, according to interviews, no longer an addict.

One narrative thread deals with the narrator's cruel mother. This part of the book, Myerson said in that Guardian interview in 2022, is autobiographical and factual. When her mother dies, in both book and life, Myerson didn't attend the funeral.

Unfortunately, Myerson's attempt to blur the line between fiction and non-fiction makes her book less successful as either one.