“I was once on a panel that gave a prestigious award to Julie Myerson for her first novel, Sleepwalking, an elegantly overwrought account of an abused woman who begins a passionate affair. Myerson has said there are autobiographical elements to it, but if so they were properly obfuscated by the routine devices of fiction. She since seems to have forgotten that all good fiction is a form of psychic autobiography: there’s no need to give such revelations the seeming authority of fact, when fiction speaks with greater authenticity.
“In the intervening decade and a half, Myerson has carved herself a literary career using the actualité of her own life for copy. This writerly cannibalism has now reached a grim apotheosis, with the author herself pre-puffing her latest book, The Lost Child, with revelations of how she and her husband exiled their eldest child from the family home because of his addiction to marijuana.”
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