The Lost Child
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
'The most controversial book in Britain'
'Urgent and vivid ... A serious, writerly, self-critical account of what it means to feel that, despite love and hope and good intentions, you have failed as a parent, and that the child you bore (while still eerily, painfully familiar) is lost to you.' Daily Telegraph
'An aching, empty-nest memoir: a mother mourning for her uncomplicated little children, now grown, whom she could care for, write about without comeback, love - and control' The Times
One bleak, late winter's day, 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 watercolours that uniquely reflected the world she lived in. But Mary died at the age of twenty-one, and when Julie comes across this album, she is haunted by the potential never realised, the barely-lived life cut short.
And most of all, she is reminded of her own child.
Because only days earlier, Julie and her husband locked their eldest son out of the family home. He was just seventeen. How could it have come to this? After a happy growing-up, it had taken only a matter of months for this bright, sweet, good-humoured boy to completely lose his way and propel his family into daily chaos.
He had discovered cannabis and was now smoking it everyday - and nothing they could say or do, no help they could offer, seemed to reach him. And Julie - whose emotionally fragile relationship with her own father had left her determined to love her children better - had to accept that she was, for the moment at least, powerless to bring back the boy she had known.
Honest, warm and often profoundly upsetting, 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 - however absolute, however unconditional - is not enough to save her child?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this difficult, unsettling memoir, English novelist (Sleepwalking) Myerson attempts a tricky bifurcated journey between two lives, past and present. Clearly, the author began with the intent of tracing the obscure life and work of a 19th-century artist, Mary Yelloly, who had once lived in Myerson's town of Suffolk and died of tuberculosis at age 21, in 1838. The author was given some of Yelloly's watercolors and proceeded to research the extended family as well as uncover where Mary was buried in the nearby Woodton churchyard. However, another life crisis pressed to the forefront: that of her oldest son, who at 17 began to exhibit bizarrely aggressive behavior from smoking "cannabis," driving his parents to despair and the painful decision to kick him out of their home. Myerson's memoir, while erecting the elaborate and frequently tedious genealogy of the Yelloly and Suckling clans, on the one hand, is utterly overrun and undermined by the stunning cruelty of the very real teenager (e.g., selling drugs to his little brother, ignoring the pregnancy of his girlfriend, punching his mother), on the other. The whole effect of Victorian portraits and letters, details of the cringing servility with which Myerson and her husband deal with their son and memories of the author's own teenage rupture with her father makes for a surreally touching textual kaleidoscope.
