Myerson's book is just one of two familial addiction memoirs reviewed in yesterday's Times. The other is a review of Kaylie Jones's memoir, Lies My Mother Never Told Me. Jones is the daughter of James Jones, author of From Here to Eternity, but her memoir focuses on her alcoholic, "histrionic" mother Gloria. Reviewer Janet Maslin says Jones "exposes her mother's cruelty, narcissism and heavy drinking, reeling off story after story about her mother's scorching wisecracks and bravura displays of malice." "Kaylie is at her fieriest," she continues, "in describing the step-by-step souring of her dealings with her mother and the ghastly decline of her mother's physical and mental health." A memoir that takes a mother's "ghastly decline" as it own aesthetic apex sounds potentially distasteful, but Maslin praises Jones's candor, saying, "she doesn't let propriety blunt her memories."

Gloria Jones is dead now, and can't be harmed by anything her daughter writes. But Jake Myerson, son of Julie Myerson and subject of her memoir The Lost Child, is very much alive — and only twenty years old. When Julie Myerson chose to write about her son's teenage marijuana addiction and her eventual decision to kick him out of the house, her British readership was outraged. The Times's Patricia Cohen says Myerson "was pilloried in her home country this spring as cruel, selfish and manipulative." Myerson elaborates: "a bit of a witch burning was what it felt like." Myerson feels that both memoir and drug addiction are less taboo in America, where she's releasing the book this week, and she hopes "Americans won't rush in and judge me."

But the harshest judgment may have come from the subject of the book, Myerson's son Jake. In a March interview with the Daily Mail, he vented his anger not only at the book but at his mother's anonymous column Living With Teenagers. Earlier in March, Myerson had confessed, "I wrote Living With Teenagers. I did so anonymously because I wanted to write truthfully, and that meant my children's identities had to be obscured." But, Jake says,

The thing is, it wasn't really anonymous; not to the people who knew us, those who matter. Having grown up with this, being written about in an arbitrary way since the age of two, I have always said to my parents 'Please don't do this, I hate this.' I was made to feel I was wrong for being offended by it.

He also accuses his mother of repeatedly denying she was the author of the column, even after his school friends worked it out and began to tease him. Of The Lost Child, he says,

What she has done has taken the very worst years of my life and cleverly blended it into a work of art, and that to me is obscene. I was only 17, I was a confused teenager, I was too young really to know who I was or what was happening.

He adds that before its publication, "she gave me a copy of the manuscript of The Lost Child and told me to read it. She wanted my approval; the problem is she would have published it regardless." Somewhat distastefully, Jake's comments to the Daily Mail caused Julie Myerson's publisher to rush the book out two months early in order to take advantage of the controversy.

Jake Myerson has lots more choice words for his mother, calling her a "pseudo New Labour socialist" who greatly exaggerated her son started action and "couldn't survive" without writing about her family. But Jake himself is very young and not exactly restrained — he talks about his siblings, one of whom is still a minor, and says his parents should have gotten a divorce — and it's hard to believe his side of the story is the unalloyed truth. The image he paints (with eager assists by the Daily Mail) of Julie Myerson as unrepentant fame-whore is probably oversimplified. That said, Myerson does sound like a piece of work. In her last Living With Teenagers column, she wrote,

There was no way I would or could continue writing with them knowing what I was doing. Over those two years, as our teenagers bloomed and matured and softened, and became so much more vulnerable, so the column began to feel less like some kind of benign, semi-comic revenge and more like a betrayal.

Getting back at your "ghastly" mom is one thing, but should you really be using your column to get "revenge" on your children, no matter how benign? And does "the importance of publicizing the nightmare of teenage drug use" — the justification Myerson and her husband use for publishing The Lost Child — really outweigh a young man's desire to keep his painful adolescence private? In the Times, Susan Cheever basically says: totally! Author of two addiction memoirs, one of which describes her assignations with two men while her daughter was sick, she explains, "I strongly believe everybody has the right to their own story." But everyone's story includes other people's, and artistic autonomy becomes a lot less admirable when those people are your children.

Cheever may be working out some of her own revenge, since her dad wrote "very, very thinly" veiled novels about their family. Perhaps she's so adamant about her right to her own story because, as a child, she was deprived of control over it. The same thing, it seems, has happened to Jake Myerson. Of his parents, he says, "They are writers, they are published, they have a voice. I don't." But the Daily Mail has been only too happy to give him a voice — unfortunately, his mother hasn't set a very good example of how to use it.

A Mother's Memoir, A Son's Anguish [NYT]
A Daughter's Memoir, A Mother's Anguish [NYT]
'You're The Addict, Mum!' Son Of Julie Myerson Says She's Hooked On Exploiting Her Own Children [Daily Mail]
Mum, What You Did Is Obscene: The Son Julie Myerson Kicked Out For Smoking Pot Tells His Side Of The Story [Daily Mail]

Brownell, author of Mommy Doesn't Drink Here Anymore, writes in Women's eNews,

Since becoming a mother five years before, I've longed to hang on to a part of myself that isn't smeared in Mommy goo. The part that laughs at parties, looks good in heels and earns a living while spending quality time with loved ones. I want to be the anti-June Cleaver, the un-wife, the un-mother, loving and present, but not invisible or brainless.

And while it is gravely oversimplifying to say this is why I drink, drinking does begin as a bulwark against the onslaught of mama drones, an enjoyable evening ritual, a life raft—cheaper and easier to do with young children than yoga or running. Only later does it become the best part of every day.

If Brownell's experience is any guide, far from keeping women from drinking, the stereotype of the mother as angel in the house may actually drive them to it. For her, drinking was a way of recapturing an old identity, an identity partially erased by society's assumptions that moms are no fun, don't look good in heels, and are brainless.

Cheever (a sober alcoholic whose father John Cheever had alcohol problems too) focuses mainly on America's widespread acceptance of drinking — and, in some situations, even of drinking and driving — but she also offers a telling speculation about Schuler's thought process:

Diane Schuler was a mother of two small children who loaded her own kids and three others into her minivan for a long drive home from a camping trip. Small children, because they are so tied to our hearts, have the ability to drive us crazy with their complaints and carsickness and impatience. (Small kids are special in this regard.) Perhaps to fortify herself for the drive, Schuler reached for vodka and pot, substances she had probably used in the past. It may not seem obvious to someone who has never had a drinking problem, but for a woman whose most reliable support had become alcohol, it could make a kind of sad, twisted sense.

Dealing with kids, Cheever points out, is hard. It's especially hard when your "marriage starts having more bad days than good," as Brownell's and possibly Schuler's did. And for some moms, alcohol can be a refuge from these difficulties. In an old but highly worth-reading article, also in Women's eNews, Gretchen Cook writes that "society has generally stereotyped alcoholics as the guy curled up with his bottle on Skid Row," and this severely hampers efforts to help women like Schuler. Cook talks to Tracey Deschaine, a nurse who has worked in recovery centers and who says that the Alcoholics Anonymous approach most popular for treating alcoholism isn't well-suited to women. She's especially critical of the First Step, which requires AA members to admit powerlessness over alcohol. She tells Cook,

Women have known all along they're powerless, that's part of the reason they fall victim to drugs or alcohol. They need to be told they have power inside them to get well. And in the Fourth Step, you have to go out and emotionally flog yourself. Nobody has to tell women to flog themselves. They do it all the time.

While the idea that all women emotionally flog themselves is a stereotype itself, it's worth noting that AA encourages people to embrace a feeling many women struggle against: the feeling that outside forces control their lives. Some of these outside forces — damaging assumptions about motherhood, lack of readily available childcare help, higher expectations of mothers than of fathers — need to be challenged, not accepted. Only when we recognize that mothers aren't perfect, and that they sometimes use dangerous coping mechanisms to deal with the very real stresses of their lives, will we be able to stop Diane Schuler's tragedy from repeating itself.

"How Could She?" Well, I Have A Theory [Salon]
At First, Drinking Made It Easier to Be a Mom [Women's eNews]
New Research Confirms Alcohol Is Gender-Sensitive [Women's eNews]

Earlier: Why Are We So Shocked When Moms Drive Drunk?

Cheever writes on the New York Times' website that people in New York are drinking less, and she bases this conclusion on the anecdotal evidence that those in her circle are drinking less. Two things about that: Susan, honey, you're 65 years old. Perhaps part of the reason your friends drink less now is that they can't stomach it anymore! But, she takes this opportunity to say that she misses when her buddies used to get fall down drunk because "For us sober people there is a kind of drunkenfreude to watching others embarrass themselves, mangle their words and do things they will regret in the morning — if they even remember them in the morning."

Cheever gleefully describes a friend tottering around at a party a decade ago.

As dessert ended, the woman in the red dress got up and stumbled toward the bathroom… As coffee splashed into porcelain demitasse cups, the woman in the red dress returned, sank sloppily into her chair and reached for the Courvoisier. Someone gently moved the bottle away. “Are you shaying I’m drunk?” she demanded. Even in the candlelight I noticed that the lipstick she had reapplied was slightly to the left of her lips

Would this friend have described herself as merely "tipsy"? Maybe, because according to a new report, women use euphemisms to describe their excessive drinking, and those euphemisms can lead them to underestimate their intake. According to the Telegraph, "Men used more forceful words, like 'hammered' and 'wasted'. The researchers found that when women described an evening's drinking as getting 'tipsy' they were talking about consuming four drinks over two hours which is actually classed as a binge for females."

Moral of these two stories? Beware of getting tipsy, ladies, or your abstemious friends will feel smugly superior. Happy holidays!

Drunkenfreude [NY Times]
'Tipsy' Women Have Drunk More Than They Realise [Telegraph]

Earlier: 'Writer Spawn Susan Cheever's Issues Have Issues