
Although Julie Myerson made her name with her often dark fiction, it was her near-the-knuckle writings about her own children that caused a minor scandal and divided her readers.
Myerson’s 2003 Man Booker Prize-nominated book Something Might Happen deals with convoluted family relationships in the wake of a brutal and motiveless murder of a woman in a seaside town resembling Southwold in Suffolk (where Myerson has a second home). Needless to say, Myerson, who wrote a regular anonymous newspaper column about the travails of living with her three teenage children and caused a furore with an unsparing book about her son Jake, is particularly convincing when detailing the lives of the families’ children and the complicated emotions they evoke in their parents.