NONFICTION

A NOVEL JULIE MYERSON

Corsair, 288pp, £16.99

Julie Myerson’s nonfiction account of her 17-year-old son’s cannabis addiction, published in 2009, met with much controversy. Thirteen years later, the author has published a novel about a teenage girl’s addiction to heroin and called it,

Nonfiction, a title which, said Hephzibah Anderson in the

Observer, sounds ‘overly meta’. Myerson is teasing her critics by making fiction and nonfiction indeterminable. Her novel, Anderson observed, ‘blazes with truths about not just addiction but female identity and maternal love’.

Anderson enjoyed ‘its bareknuckle engagement with what it means to be a writer – with the compulsion to turn life into art, whatever the cost, and the extent to which any wordsmith can ever really be trusted’. The mother in the novel observes that for a writer ‘nothing stops them chronicling even the most devastating experiences’. Anderson admired Myerson’s courage not to spare herself nor the reader: ‘here is a book that instantly sucks the reader down into a swirling vortex of grief, trauma and powerlessness’.

Claire Allfree, in the Telegraph, found the revisitation of the subject, this time disguised as a novel, unappealing, ‘while Nonfiction reads on one level as a writer defending the right to write what she likes in whichever way she pleases, its knowing proximity to real life is also unavoidable’. She concluded, ‘What I couldn’t get over was how little I actually cared about the novel’s blood and guts; the unfolding tragedy at its centre.’ Alex Peake-tomkinson in the

Spectator agreed, ‘I did feel it might now be time for Myerson to look beyond her own life.’