Julie Myerson: a life in writing

Exactly four years ago, novelist Julie Myerson found herself at the centre of a media storm. Over the course of a few weeks her family and career became the subject of intense scrutiny as it emerged, via a series of newspaper articles, that she was not only on the verge of publishing a memoir about what she described as her eldest son's addiction to cannabis, but was also the author of the anonymous Living with Teenagers column that had just stopped running in the Guardian's Family section because one of her kids guessed it was about them.

Over tea in a London hotel, Myerson says she is still getting over what happened next. "I don't know if you would call it a breakdown, I don't like to call it a breakdown, but I went to pieces after it and have only recently got my confidence back. I lost my ability to do lots of things that I needed to be able to do, like drive and so on. It really knocked me. We'd had the most difficult two or three years you could imagine, there was a lot of stuff I haven't written about. And so all of us, including me, were very vulnerable and when you're in the middle of something you don't always see that."

Myerson, who had been a regular on the BBC's Newsnight Review, stopped doing live television. "I couldn't even do radio," she says. She still hasn't driven a car – the family got rid of theirs to be green anyway – and for the past two years has used meditation techniques learned on a course recommended by her GP as a way to control her anxiety.

In professional terms she got quickly back on track, publishing a novel, Then, two years after The Lost Child, and from a glance at her backlist you would never guess there had been a crisis.

Her latest book, her ninth novel, The Quickening, under the Hammer crime imprint, is a honeymoon thriller featuring a grisly trail of corpses and set in an Antigua holiday resort. It looks like a bold attempt at something new, more plot-driven and commercial. Hammer was created to lure literary names to try their hand at genre and Helen Dunmore and Jeanette Winterson have already had a go. In many ways it feels natural territory for Myerson, who has always been drawn to the supernatural, but the mechanics of genre are very different and she took more advice than usual from her editor. "If it sells," she says, "I'll do it again, but I'm concerned there are lots of people who know how to do this better than I do."

But from the way she talks – eager to justify her decisions one minute and the next anxious not to pique further press interest in other family members – there is no mistaking that what happened to the Myersons was awful. There is also no getting away from it. In the 20 years since Myerson sent her debut novel, Sleepwalking, to four agents and secured her first contract, she has made a speciality of writing about heightened emotional states. She has also made a habit of digging into some of her own most troubling experiences, starting with her father's rejection of her as a teenager and his suicide.

"When you make your own death as he did, you deliberately stir the black silt on the bottom, disturbing all that debris which should be left down there in darkness," she wrote on page one of her debut, as a way of introducing her fictionalised account of his death. She says now that she did this "probably slightly coldly, because I felt I had recovered from my father's rejection and it was good material for a novel. It was a very typical first novel in the sense that I had to try and work out what I had in my life that I could write about. Not much had happened to me except having babies and being rejected by my father."

Like Myerson, her father had a taste for horror, and, when she couldn't sleep, he would let her stay up late to watch the Hammer films that inspired The Quickening.

Two decades into her writing life, she looks back and recognises that she has perhaps not been as fully in control of her subject matter as she imagined. "Lots of things in my fiction have later come back to hit me," she says, offering her favourite among her books, Laura Blundy, as an example. "That novel is about a mother's loss of her child, but why did I write that then? You find things very deep in yourself when you're writing and that's what I think is interesting."

"All my novels are an exact projection of the state of mind I was in at that time, although I don't always see that until later," she says of her book Then, when asked whether she worried about what people might say when she followed up The Lost Child with a novel about a woman who smothers her children to death in a post-apocalyptic London. "I didn't consciously set out to write about maternal guilt, but I'm not surprised it found its way in."

Myerson was born Julie Susan Pike in Nottingham in 1960, the first of three daughters of an unhappy and ill-suited couple. Her mother was the daughter of a Hungarian refugee and a religious zealot; her father's father owned a women's underwear factory. Her father lived with his mother until his marriage and in her first novel she sought to explain his damaged personality by conjuring up a sexually repressed paternal grandmother filled with hatred for her husband, son and the human condition in general.

Myerson's mother borrowed books from the library and inculcated a love of reading in her eldest daughter. Myerson says she was shy, but plucked up the courage to exchange letters with authors including Daphne du Maurier. Her parents had both left school at 15 and, in educational terms, she was determined to surpass them. She calls her family lower-middle-class on the grounds that they read only the Nottingham Evening Post and the News of the World, but there was plenty of money. The bungalow her parents built had an indoor swimming pool and when, after her mother left, there was a row about whether Myerson could stay on for A-levels, a non-fee-paying school was not thought an option. In court, her father was forced to fork out. Soon after, he wrote her a letter and cut her out of his life.

She did an English degree at Bristol University, where she was dismayed to find not everyone on the course wanted to be a writer. Her tutor was obsessed with DH Lawrence. "I think that's why I got in, because I was from Nottingham and went to the school that Ursula went to in The Rainbow." Afterwards, she took a secretarial course and got a job at the National Theatre in London, where she would get in early to do her own writing on an electric typewriter. There she met Jonathan Myerson, then working as a director. By her 30th birthday they had a home, a son and a daughter.It was on maternity leave that Myerson finally settled down to write a novel. Jonathan, she says, "was the first person who said to me, stop talking about it, just do it". So she did, in the evenings and on Sunday mornings when he would take the babies out in their buggy. Both agreed that the schedule was punishing. If no one bought the novel, they couldn't go through it again. But Myerson won a magazine talent contest for an extract she submitted about her mother – the judge, she reveals proudly, was Hilary Mantel – and this probably helped ensure that when it came to submitting the completed manuscript, agents didn't bin it.

While working as a publicist for a children's publisher, Myerson had been given a dressing-down by literary agent Gill Coleridge for not doing enough to promote one of her authors. Shrewd enough to recognise that this was the kind of agent she wanted, Myerson sent her debut novel to Coleridge and has stayed with her ever since.

After Sleepwalking, which was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys prize, Myerson published fiction regularly. Explicit about sex and the physicality of motherhood, wonderfully acute in their depiction of children, her novels also featured supernatural elements and explosions of violence. Something Might Happen, her 2003 novel about the reverberations of a horrific murder in a barely disguised Southwold, the picturesque Suffolk seaside town where her family has a second home, sold more than 100,000 copies and was longlisted for the Man Booker prize.

In her parallel career as a journalist she wrote about her young family in the Independent as part of a stable of columnists that included Helen Fielding. As a panellist on Newsnight Review she became a well-known face in arts broadcasting. She published her first book of non-fiction historical research, Home: The Story of Everyone Who Ever lived in Our House, and wrote a memoir, Not a Games Person, that again delved into her childhood.

But in 2007 she made a conscious decision to break new ground. Myerson felt that no one wrote honestly about parenting adolescents and the editors of the Guardian's new Family section encouraged her to remedy that. Living with Teenagers was an instant hit, an enthrallingly immediate, dialogue-rich account of a domestic world turned upside down. But, despite her anonymity, Myerson left out much of what was really going on in her family, above all the strife linked to her eldest son's use of skunk cannabis. When news of her forthcoming book, The Lost Child, broke, Guardian editors as well as readers were taken aback.

They thought they knew this family. As an interview with Jake Myerson in another newspaper disputing his mother's version of events spelled out, they didn't know the half of it.

The Lost Child traced the stories of two lost children. Myerson had been trying to write a biographical sketch of Mary Yelloly, an obscure young woman from a well-to-do Regency family who left behind a book of drawings of her life in Suffolk. But she found she couldn't concentrate on Yelloly (not surprisingly: she is not very interesting) and kept being distracted by the escalating drama of her own family life. So she twinned Yelloly, who died young from tuberculosis, with Jake.

In a third strand of the book, she returned to some of her own most troubling memories: the time her father decided to send his three daughters back to their mother midway through a visit, and rang to see if she was out with another man; the time he asked at bedtime if she had started her periods; the car journey she and Jonathan made when Jake was born, to show him to his grandfather. "We ask if he'd like to hold his grandson. He says no he wouldn't. I would if he was a girl, he adds. I like little girls."

Myerson's reaction to her father's suicide a couple of years later was shock, then panic. "I had been so determined to get over my father and I had a happy life. I had a nice man, I had a nice job and I had my babies," she says. "I didn't see any reason to dwell on those things, didn't see any need for therapy or anything. In fact, I think writing is like therapy because you explore things in a safe environment. But what happened with our children forced me to re-examine everything that had ever happened to me in my life and I suppose I'm only just recovering from that."

She knows she made a mistake with Living with Teenagers, which went on for too long and invaded her children's privacy, about which she is now "ashamed". But she has not forgiven the attacks on her for The Lost Child, which was shown to Jake before publication – although he challenged her claim that he had granted permission, and said she would have gone ahead regardless.

Today, Myerson says she regrets the book only because of the unwanted press attention it attracted (her husband's first wife was approached by reporters, so were neighbours and grandparents), and because it was unfair to expose Jake to the temptation of selling his story when he was young, vulnerable and short of money. "The thing that still makes me shake is all the people, many of them respected authors and even people I knew, who wrote about it without having seen it," she says. "I'm still quite angry about the laziness. And people told me this stuff! It went on and on, so they must have been getting a kind of pleasure out of it."

Does she think the criticism was harsher because she was a mother, when mothers are meant to keep dirty laundry private?

"It definitely was because I'm a mother," she says. "There was definitely a kind of witch-hunt element to The Lost Child thing and it was about me being a woman. Because they want to knock you down. If I'd been a lower-profile woman, at home in a cardigan, not going on TV, I think they might not have attacked me so much. I seemed to be somebody who was rather pleased with myself. But I suppose I am quite pleased with myself in some ways, I'm quite a happy person."

Reading her work, and the reflections of her life in it, it's hard to feel much sympathy for Myerson's father. She saw him hit her mother once – this was the row that prompted their separation – and was troubled by his pleasure in trivial acts of cruelty. As a teenager she received an extravagantly wrapped parcel which, when opened, revealed a bar of soap. More disturbing were glimpses of his sexuality. He showed her a girlie magazine on top of the cupboard when she was little (she says in the 60s this was no big deal). Later, there were bedtime kisses that made her uncomfortable.

"I must make it clear I was never abused, but he had a sexually unsavoury side, which I think as a young teenager I became attuned to. Actually, I'm still like this, I often feel I know what's going on inside people's heads and there was something about the way he was with us that made me anxious. It's a very difficult thing to talk about and to be fair to him, it could have all been in my head, but I don't think it was."

But today Myerson says she feels "protective" of him, that she wishes she had another chance and had tried harder to get him help for his depression. "I've had to come to terms with the fact that there's a lot of him in me – as you get older you see that."

Myerson immerses herself in the work of contemporaries. She admires David Vann and Lorrie Moore among others, but says: "I increasingly feel that writers aren't taking risks and that disappoints me. I like brave writing."

Whether Myerson has been brave or reckless in choosing to write about those closest to her remains a matter for debate. She says her family has repaired itself, though the issue of drugs hasn't gone away, and she had defenders as well as attackers throughout. She knows her memoir made her famous in a way her fiction never has. "I'm very conscious that at events they call me bestselling and award-winning, and I'm neither," she says.

With prizes comes higher status, which Myerson feels she lacks. But she is proud her books are all in print. "Do you know what my lifetime ambition is? To be longlisted for the Orange prize [now known as the Women's prize]," she says drily. "Not even shortlisted but longlisted. I do think I deserve to be longlisted, I've published a lot of books since that prize started and they've all got strong women in them."