The Lost Child: A Mother's Story
Book Review
In the midst of writing a book about Mary Yelloly, a woman who died of consumption in 1838, at the age of 21, Julie Myerson, a novelist living in London and the mother of three children, was encountering her own nightmare. She was being forced to throw her 17-year-old, drug addicted son out of the house.
"I am flattened, deadened. I have nothing in my mind except the deep black hole that is the loss of my child," she writes in "The Lost Child: A Mother's Story."
The Lost Child is a searing and deeply felt book, impossible to read without feeling its emotional intensity. In one passage, Myerson vividly describes her son as a tsunami: "There we all are, a little family group standing on a beach with our backs to the sea. Holding hands. Happy. Stupidly happy, because just behind us -- towering and terrifying -- the wave is approaching. A vast dark curve of water just waiting to knock us off our feet." Her own child has become a malevolent force of nature.
Although at times confusing because of the constant back and forth between Mary’s story and her own sons’, it is especially relevant for mothers who have been through losing a child. This is parenting advice on another level.