| Title | : | The Lost Child: A Mothers Story |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1596917008 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781596917002 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 336 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2009 |
While researching her next book, Julie Myerson finds herself in a graveyard, looking for traces of a young woman who died nearly two centuries before. As a child in Regency England, Mary Yelloly painted an exquisite album of watercolors that uniquely reflected the world in which she lived. But Mary died at the age of twenty-one, and when Julie comes across this album, she is haunted by the potential never realized. She is also reminded of her own child.
Only days earlier, Julie and her husband locked their eldest son out of the family home. He is just seventeen. After a happy childhood, he had discovered drugs, and it had taken only a matter of months for the boy to completely lose his way and propel his family into daily chaos. Julie — whose emotionally fragile relationship with her own father had left her determined to love her children better—had to accept that she was powerless to bring him back.
Honest, warm, and profoundly moving, this is the parallel story of a girl and a boy separated by centuries. The circumstances are very different, but the questions remain terrifyingly the same. What happens when a child disappears from a family? What will survive of any of us in memory or in history? And how is a mother to cope when love is not enough?
The Lost Child: A Mothers Story Reviews
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Julie Myerson's new book has created quite a stir, both in England when it was published in Spring, 2009 and here in the US in August, 2009. She has been the subject of numerous columns in the UK, where she had been previously railed against for publishing stories about her family - male partner, two sons and one daughter - in an ongoing, anonymous blog in a London paper for a couple of years. She wrote about her family - sometimes in shocking detail of how difficult it was to live with three teenagers - and quit only when she was exposed as the author. She had denied to her children she was the author of the blog until exposed. So already there were mixed feelings about her new book, which is mostly about her children, in particular her oldest, a son she refers to only as "the boy". "The boy" has fallen deeply into drug dependency, which, by the age of 17 has left him violent, angry, and a societal drop out.
"The boy" is not the only subject of the book; she writes about an on-going literary project about Mary Yelloly, who died as a young women in the 1830's and is known today by her watercolor prints of the house she grew up in and the society around her in Regency England. Myerson writes about her "hunt" for a woman dead almost 200 years, a hunt which includes visiting her various homes, meeting many of her direct descendants, and seeing original papers about her life. Mary was one of ten children of a doctor and his wife. Mary and several of her siblings died either in early childhood or in their 20's and 30's, mostly of consumption. So, the term, "lost child" could apply to either Mary or Myerson's son.
Myerson's son has become addicted to "skunk", a particularly virulent form of cannibus. He smokes daily and he has basically dropped out of school and is extremely violent at home. Extremely violent, if Myerson's account is to be believed. She and her partner, "the boy's father", live with this ongoing violence and try, rather ineffectively, to live day-to-day with "the boy" and his younger brother and sister. Finally, the parents kick "the boy" out of the house and he makes his way on the streets. The book ends with a somewhat hopeful idea that he's possibly hit bottom and will go in for treatment.
All the ruckus in England has tended to be about the right of a parent to write about a child. Myerson was castigated first for her writing about her children - and their lives - in her "anonymous" blog, and then, now, with the publication of this book. In the last chapter, she says she showed the manuscript to "the boy" and he made minor changes in the manuscript, and even sold her some of his poems for publication in the final draft.
I'm NOT going to review the book on the basis of the "should she or shouldn't she" write about her family. I am reviewing the book on the basis of the writing, which I think is very good. It was a hard story to tell, the one about her family, and she told it well. Whether she SHOULD have told it or not, is something she'll have to live with. -
The following is based on a FirstReads win (an advance reading copy).
Myerson's
The Lost Child A Mother's Story is actually two stories: her historical research into the (short) life of Mary Yelloly of the 1800s, and her and her family's struggle with their oldest son and his destructive drug addiction. The narrative includes the process of researching Mary, as well as what she finds (including excerpts from diaries and letters), and other stories from the author's young life as she relates them to the crisis with her son.
I liked the sections about her son. Myerson's pain as a mother - the questions, confusion, and horrible doubt - comes through. Not a huge fan of the staccato style, but I got used to it. These sections seemed real and were compelling, and address some tough questions that any loved one trying to help an addict has to deal with. As "a mother's story," it worked.
However, the rest of it. I couldn't get into the sections about Mary, the girl who died of consumption two hundred years ago. The author's obsession with her seems so distant and unrelated, even though she has tied them together in her mind. Maybe on its own the process of researching a woman from two centuries ago would be more interesting, but meshed in with a modern day tragedy just diminished Mary's side of the story. Also, trying to keep track of Mary's long family tree got old. (Maybe the final copy will have a diagram?)
Myerson does try to tie the two story lines together at the end in an imaginary meeting with Mary, followed by an afterward in which the son reads the manuscript. It's the best ending we're going to get, I suppose. -
Bisognerebbe dare due giudizi separati su questo libro: uno per ognuna delle storie che vi si intrecciano. Da una parte, una storia-pretesto che ricostruisce la vita molto breve di una giovane pittrice Mary Yelloly, morta di tuberculosi nel diciannovesimo secolo, attraverso le ricerche compiute da Julie Myerson - autore e personaggio nello stesso tempo - storia piuttosto debole, non spiacevole ma che sa più di acquarello che di pittura. Dall'altra parte, la storia vera, quella della donna che scrive la biografia di Mary Yelloly ma che, in realtà, è completamente presa, stritolata nella vicenda di suo figlio, tossico. Ecco, questa merita. E' dolente, tenerissima e crudele, e ci mostra da molto vicino che cosa sia per un padre, una madre, dover chiedere al proprio figlio di andar via di casa. Julie Myerson, visibilmente, sa esattamente di che cosa sta parlando. "Nostro figlio se n'è andato e ci possiamo rilassare tutti. Lo abbiamo amato per una vita intera, ce ne siamo presi cura e adesso lui è là fuori chissà dove per le strade e noi possiamo tutti rilassarci. E' un'idea terribile per me." E' una vera amputazione che deve infliggere alla sua famiglia per salvare la pelle, anche quella del figlio, forse. Non è facile viverle queste storie, non deve neppur essere facile scriverle, e se parlo di questo libro, peraltro non eccezionale nella scrittura, è per la sua capacità di raccontare l'umiliazione, la disfatta, la capitolazione di genitori, senza indulgere né nella violenza, pur presente tra le righe, né nella compassione.
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I won this book from First Reads! I was intrigued by the cover and even more so my the book description. I can't wait to get it and to read it!
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The 2 stories didn’t work together in my opinion. I would rather have read each one separately. In fact actually I wasn’t very interested in the Mary story and hurried through those sections to get back to the more interesting story of her relationship with her son.
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I didn't think, during the first half of this book, that I would end up saying I liked it...at least not without lying. I really wasn't into it until about halfway through, and even then, it was a difficult read. But now that I've finished it, and I've seen how it all comes together, I feel that calm, satisfied feeling of reading a book that I don't regret reading.
The Lost Child is a book I never would have given a second thought, except that I won it in a giveaway and didn't have much choice. Maybe that was why I was automatically hesitant to like it; I've never been keen on assigned reading. But I also hesitated to like it because of my stubborn distaste for unconventional grammar, and this book doesn't use a single quotation mark in any of its dialogue. That was distracting the whole way through.
But, petty preferences aside, this book is good. It is real, and it is painful, and it is inspiring. The author tells her own story without holding back, and she crafts the story of another's life -- a life lost some 150 years ago -- with diligent research and a lot of emotional connection.
It's good. I can't really say much more than that, because having finished it only minutes ago, I am completely drained. It's definitely a book that will shake you up. I'm 24 years old, newly married, and I can't imagine ever being able to live through losing my own child. It scares me to death. -
Two seemingly very different true-to-life stories woven together into one -- that's the gist of Myerson's The Lost Child. Did she pull it off smoothly? For the most part, yes, I think so. The writing style is a little different -- reminiscent in my mind to James Frey -- but I kind of liked that about this book. I felt like she nailed it down as far as expressing a mother's feelings of love & helplessness in dealing with her son's drug addiction & there were times I really ached for her. During this same period of time, Myerson is collecting historical information about a girl who grew up in England in the early 1800's, but who died at age 21, leaving behind her legacy in watercolors done as she was growing up. Myerson interweaves both these stories: her personal struggle w/ her son's addiction & her hunt to really get to "know" this young girl from the 19th century by piecing together the various clues she collects through her descendents. Some readers may have difficulty meshing these two stories together, but I thought it was a refreshing approach and overall found myself really wondering what was going to happen next in both instances.
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1.5 stars. Not recommended for anyone except the Yelloly and Suckling families in England.
The Lost Child is two sub par books made worse by their clumsy interchange and degraded further by the marginal "poems" that bridge the chapters.
In contemplating the best part(s) of the book it's easy to settle on one strength: the author does an excellent job of expressing the feelings of hope of parents for their young children.
The challenge comes in sorting out the book's many problems. Myerson's son, Jake, (referred to throughout as merely "the boy") comes across as such a detestable boor that it's impossible to muster any empathy for him. Myerson's husband, Jonathan, (referred to throughout as "the boy's father") is flaccidly drawn and completely one-dimensional. Myerson's father adds the elements of creepiness and mental illness to this dreary mess. The author's imagined conversation with Mary Yelloly at the end of the book was tired and over-wrought.
The Mary Yelloly story is the better part of the book but that isn't saying much. The excitement of discovery is the author's exclusively. As she pieced clues together and switched back and forth between the Yelloly story and her own I couldn't help but wonder if I had enough gas in my car to get me through the week. -
This true story of the narrators search for what happened to the young girl from the 1880s whose watercolours the narrator is shown and her own terrifying battle with the drug addiction of her beloved son are both vividly drawn in this book. They both share, loosely, the experience of loss. I found the connection failed however as there was no connection or effective narrative bridge between the two young people - Mary Yelolly and 'the boy' - who were the central characters. This book is about Julie Myerson as well and I found her presence an increasingly unwelcome intrusion in the unfolding lives of the long dead girl and her very alive son. I really enjoyed the way she described her search for Mary, the detective work, the wins and losses she encountered, the people she met on the path. Her son, constantly and annoyingly referred to as 'the boy' - leapt from the pages as did the careful interactions between her and her husband - 'the boys father'. There are many readers I suspect who might find elements of their own both angry and loving sons in the helpless interactions she draws. Mary and 'the boy' never reached for me that seamless place in a story however that makes it hold together as a whole. It is two stories and the authors personal journey needs to be seperate, maybe in terms of how writing this and getting reprieve from her very real pain by the escape and excitement into researching and writing up Mary's life helped? As it stands I am left with a lot of questions an curiousity about Mary's life and the social conditions of the time and about 'the boy's life and all those other young boys and girls like him. 3 stars because it was good enough to stick with and read to the end despite growing irritation. And also because she made me cry.
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A profoundly moving and affecting book! The author perfectly captures the intense joy of discovery that awaits the social historian uncovering hitherto unseen documents and artifacts. Interwoven between this story of an early 19th century English family cruelly decimated by illness is the tale of her own personal mothering trauma as her teenaged son succumbs to drug addiction.
Myerson skillfully interweaves the two stories, and each is heightened by contrast to the other. She has a true gift for bringing individuals vividly to life with a few carefully chosen words. Particularly poignant are the quotations from the family letters and journals of the long-departed young woman whose life captures her attention. Jane Austen fans will delight in the glorious language of the period. Curious and compelling tidbits of history are sprinkled throughout the narrative, relieving what might otherwise be an oppressively gut-wrenching tale of maternal anguish. -
I am stopping reading this about 1/2 way through. It has an annoying lack of cohesion, quotation marks or any basis in reality. Her son gets violent because he's a pot addict? On what planet is this pot from?
Mostly I'm annoyed with this book because it's really much more about her research into a Regency era young woman's life. This is seemingly wholly unconnected to her family problems at least here at the halfway point in the book. -
While both the story of Mary Yelloly and the story of the author’s son are equally interesting, I really didn’t feel the were connected in any substantive way. The result was like reading two separate news stories at the same time, with brief interruptions from the author’s own childhood. Somewhat hard to follow, but thought provoking in its own way.
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Read this at a time in my life when we were struggling with similar issues with our son. So very close to home. I loved the juxtaposed story of the Suffolk girl from the past. Slightly haunting. Always love a Myerson though. Great author.
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2,5 ☆
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This tells the story of a mother whose son stops going to school, who becomes a different person. It takes the parents months to realize that more is going on than just teenagerhood, that their previously happy, well-adjusted son has become a drug addict. Then there's the longer stretch where they discover that love and support aren't going to help him, and finally the point, after he's stolen and lied and intimidated and hit her, that he has to leave for the sake of the remaining family members. Then they let him return, because they miss him, because the thought of him sleeping in a doorway or going hungry is intolerable. This story is raw and honest and powerful. It's well worth reading, whether or not you have children, just to understand a little of what so many people go through.
This is, however, a relatively small part of the book. The larger portion is where Myerson researches the life of a nineteenth century family, and especially the second youngest child, who dies young. They were an ordinary upper class family, and the details are sometimes sketchy. One gets the feeling that Myerson is using this research as a way of retreating from her son's story; it's certainly how this is used in the book. As the situation at home intensifies, she pulls the reader away to the slow process of research, dusty documents and bemused decedents. It's interesting, but in a slower, subdued way. It doesn't mesh with the wrenching drama of the modern segments.
The book ends when it ends, without resolution. Myerson's son is still out there, denying his problem. Myerson includes several of her son's poems and they are exactly what one would expect from a self-pitying teenager.
This book is flawed, but it's important, being an honest and raw account of how a parent feels and adapts to losing a beloved child to addiction. It's not a misery memoir or a how-to guidebook. It doesn't preach or whine, but simply lays out a good parent's anguish at discovering that one can provide all the love and security in the world and still be unable to protect the very person one loves the most. -
This is my first win in the Advance Copy Giveaways and I was very excited to receive it in the mail. It was a compelling read for me. My ex-husband was in the US Air Force and was stationed at RAF Upper Heyford in England back in the 70's. I gave birth to my two youngest children at the John Radcliffe Maternity Hospital in Oxford. This English author took me back to when I lived in Brill. We were the only Americans in the tiny town. I took the double decker bus on Tuesdays to the Thames Market. I lived in the Square which was really a triangle. I lived in the last little rowhouse opposite the village Doctor and Apothecary and opposite the Vicarage and the Butcher shop. I loved it there and I remember walking through the old graveyard beside the stone church. I saw the centuries old stones with barely legible names and dates etched in them. I recognize the English but not our American English. My 3 and 4 year old daughters came in from preschool asking for 'squash and biscuits' just like the English children did. (For those that don't know, that means 'juice and cookies' to us.)
Julie Myerson takes you on a journey of joys and despairs that motherhood can bring. You feel her helplessness, hopelessness and her heartbreak. I don't mind to tell you that I shed tears with her, too. I don't know how she found the energy to continue with her book research while going through such turmoil in her personal life. I imagine she felt like she was constantly holding her breath. It is so interesting the way she intertwined her own life with the research of the girl that has been dead for 2 centuries. I love her reference to her son as 'our boy'. And, I especially liked his bits of perspective and his poetry that she included. I hope they are both well and good. I would recommend this book, wholeheartedly; but, keep the tissues close at hand. -
I found this book curiously lacking in insight.
As many critics have already remarked, the sections in which the author describes her attempts to find out more about the water colour painter Mary Yelloly are rather laboured. Although she strains to make the artist come alive Mary remains a slight, elusive and really rather uninteresting figure.
In writing about her unnamed male child - who is heavily dependent on cannabis - Julie Myerson is too engaged to be able to stand back and narrate from any perspective other than that of the 'hurt' and bewiledered mother. Other viewpoints, even those within the family, are either marginalised or excluded entirely.
So the writing gets repetitive and claustrophobic. Although there's plenty of emotion in these sections - buckets of it - I found the writing oddly uninformative. There was no sense at all of why a young person might choose to smoke heavily, no analysis of the arguments about the extent to which cannabis may (or many not)cause long-term damage to users - and no sense of how larger social factors could have affected an adolescent growing up in South London in the early 21st centruy.
It was interesting to read a book that had triggered such a lot of a debate. Yet ultimately disappointing. -
Overall I did like the book. When I had read the synopsis it sounded very intersting, but I have to agree with Julie's son in the Afterword that I was not very interested in the Mary Yelloly part of the story. I feel it was important for it to be there because it was what Julie was going through at the time and the two stories did intertwine for her. Parts of the history were certainly interesting and the descriptions Julie gave were amazing; at times I felt like I was there with her reading through the Yelloly family history or touring Narbourgh togehter. The part of the story about her son was the more interesting side of the story. I have read "A Beautiful Boy" and "Tweak" and Julie's story was very similar to that of David Sheff. I could feel her heartache and the strain on her marriage and friendships. I do recommend this book; it is very well written and description to the point where you can get lost in the details and feel as though you are right there with Julie sharing her experiences.
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The Lost Child is a book by Julie, a mother, who suffers daily physically and emotionally of her lost boy. A boy lost to the addiction of drugs. She struggles with giving him tough love or just enabling him. Also during this time she is researching for this book on the story about Mary Yelloly's short life in the 1820's and 1830's.
Julie's most valuable lesson from writing this book and coming to terms with her life is as follows (which is taken from her acknowledgements): "that you can make your babies and you can love them with every single cell of your being, but you can't make them safe, you can't in the end chose how their lives turn out." This is a profound point in Julie's life learnings. This book is not really about Mary, or even her son and his drug addiction, it is about herself.
At times this book was very difficult to follow with it jumping from the 1800's to present day drug addiction. -
Is it out of fashion to use quotation marks in books now? It seems that i've been reading a lot of books lately where the auther chooses not to use them. In the case of this book, it got really confusing at times. She writes the book to a historical character (perhaps real but i've never heard of Mary Yelloly) so when she is actually talking to someone else or to Mary it's sometimes hard to tell. But it is also about her son and their problems, her father's issues, and random bits of Yelloly history thrown in. I stopped reading the history parts and only finished the book because it was free from goodreads. The part about her son was interesting, enough to keep me reading. ANd then, near the end she has odd conversations with Mary Yelloly (who's been dead for hundreds of years) about her son. I think it would have been better for her to write about her her issues of her son and only put in some of what she was working on at the time.
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It's always a good idea to read a book that you wouldn't usually, under normal circumstances, read. It gives you a chance to expand your horizons, but this book was so far out of my comfort zone, that I could not even attempt to enjoy it. There were parts that were semi-interesting, her struggles with her drug-addicted son, which reminded me a lot of other novels I've read about drug addiction. Then there were parts that were so completely uninteresting, that at times I really wanted to stop reading or skim over them; the parts about the young girl from the 1800's that died at a young 21 years of age. While I appreciate that during this point in her life Myerson was having a tough time trying to find out more about this young girl and dealing with her in denial, drug-addicted son, I just could not muster any sympathy or compassion or interest.
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I received this book as a Goodreads First Read winner, which always excites me! The book is actually two stories, it seems. The author writes about a young lady that grew up and died at a young age in the 1800's, and also writes about her drug addicted son. Throughout the entire book, I kept looking for a connection. The parts about her son were very heart-wrenching and interesting. The parts about the Yelloly family were okay. I did find it interesting that instead of a "story" about Mary Yelloly, it was more a journey of her research and writing process, which as an aspiring author myself, was entertaining. It was not until the afterword that I felt any kind of connection between her son and the Yelloly girl. I did enjoy her writing style and could feel her pain as she wrote about her son.
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Wow this book was fascinating. A painful memoir by British writer who wove together her personal painful childhood, her teenage son's drug addition and the story of an obscure 19th century artist. I was less satisfied with the latter part of the story, thus my low star rating. However the story of her son's struggle with drugs, and how the family deals with this was fascinating. Goes right up there with "Beautiful Boy" and "Tweak". Interesting that all of these personal stories with drug addition are by writers. Even the Lost Child himself is a stunning poet whose evocative lyrical pieces are strategically highlighted in the book. I received a quick lesson in the difference between Skunk and pot. I had no idea that skunk is so different from the pot of days past and can actually kill the frontal lobes of the brain. Yikes!
