Everybody's wading into Julie Moanerson which can only bode well for her book sales.
Someone at the Standard rang me up and asked me if I wanted to don my wellies and jump into the shallows and recount the terrible goings on of my own feral kids for a modest fee and a little plug for my book.
I used to read her Guardian weekend column the way some people enjoy porn – relishing the all-too familiar aspects of dysfunctional family life with a sense of horrified relief and schadenfreude, while guiltily acknowledging that other people were being exploited for my viewing pleasure.
But I still wouldn't want to enter into a kicking competition with her - frankly, I don't have a welly to stand on. I have to sheepishly admit that I too have pimped out my family in print – but those days are long gone. At dinner the other night my youngest daughter fixed me with her gimlet, black-lined eyes and announced that people who write about their kids without telling them are disgusting. I had a horrible suspicion she was talking about my Weekend Guardian Article which, gulp, I hadn’t actually mentioned .
'Don’t worry, you didn't say anything remotely Meyerson about the kids though,' my ex admitted, grudgingly - it was after all about the futility of trying to date as a single parent who lives with children - I don't think he feels it should be an option. Idid try very hard not say anything that would be too humiliating for anyone concerned. Unfortunately, I didn't reckon on the sub's idea of a supposed ironic headline.
So much for that, then.
Having a dig at your kids for profit or therapy is an unequal fight and one in which the parent-as-hack can too easily become a bully to a child who has no voice and no platform and who has put you in a position of trust. But it’s so tempting As a writer –you hit the mother-lode when it comes to material – especially if you’re looking for black humour.
The family is supposed to be a safe place in which we learn about fairness and injustice and how to behave in the wider world – how to hate, how to love, how to forgive, and how to fit into society. It seems a betrayal when this supposedly safe place becomes a stage on which our every foible is illuminated It’s like living with the Stasi if everything we do is recorded and then, worse, relayed to the not-so great British Public. If my parents had chosen to broadcast my own reckless adolescent behaviour I would have been mortified, and as a supposed adult with all my own hideous secrets and mistakes – I certainly wouldn’t like to be scrutinised in a column called Living with Crap Parents as written by my kids.
When I saw some or my ‘family sayings’ on my son’s Facebook page under the headline ‘Mother’s PC Moment’ I wanted to die of embarrassment. I learned quickly – quotations work both ways. I still itch to write about my teenage kids, but people in glass houses really should put up curtains and be careful when they open them. If I don’t want to read about my own less than textbook behaviour in a newspaper – why should they? My eldest daughter has also two unpublished novels under her bed. I really don’t want to be one of the characters.
In any case the Standard pulled the proposed story after the second shooting in Germany.
I can just imagine the next phone call.
‘Marion, I’m just wondering - do any of your kids have access to firearms?'
Absolutely not, but either way – if they did it seems like a jolly good reason not to write about them…
