Julie Myerson book row escalates

The unseemly spat between the novelist Julie Myerson and her son, Jake (pictured), about whom she has written a highly personal memoir in which she reveals how she kicked him out of the family’s South London home three years ago after he became addicted to skunk cannabis, shows no sign of abating.

Jake, now 20, has said his mother is "slightly insane" and is furious about being exploited in her forthcoming book, The Lost Son, which reveals how Jake’s drug-taking led her to worry for the safety of her two other children. Jake told the Sunday Telegraph that his mother had “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. What she describes in her book are a series of incidents, it's not who I am and I find it very sad that she feels the need to tar me with the 'drug addict' brush."

Jake, who describes himself as a Libertarian and only an occasional pot-smoker, claims that he pleaded with his mother not to publish the book, and even consulted lawyers, only to have his requests overridden.

However, this is denied by his father, the playwright Jonathan Myerson. "We showed it to him and he took it away to read," he says. "He came back the next day and sat down with us, asking for about half a dozen alterations which we made. In the meantime Julie had read some poems he had written and asked if she could use some of them in the book. Jake was happy with that.

"Never, at any time, did he throw up his hands in horror. If he had, we simply wouldn't have published. Simple as that. I know he said he wasn't consulted but, well, I'm afraid he was lying about that. In fact we even gave him a small amount of money because we felt he had contributed."

Myerson Snr added: "What can we do now? Just hope, I think. Skunk has drained Jake of all motivation. There's so little left of the Jake we once knew. We can only hope. Everything else is in Jake's hands now."

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