Should The Lost Child have been written? This mother’s tale of kicking her violent, drug-addicted seventeen-year-old son out of the family house set off a media storm earlier this year even though it was not due to be published until 4 May. ‘Absolutely appalling’, said one typical contributor to press debates. 

Right adjective, wrong target. If expelling a child from the family nest is an unimaginable act, it is that much more important to know why and how a well-known author, journalist, celeb and mother of three did it. What is misjudged in Julie Myerson’s gripping book is its padding-out with an utterly uninteresting story about Mary Yelloly, an early nineteenth-century Suffolk painter who died of consumption.

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