Julie Myerson’s newest book “Nonfiction: A Novel” is not just a tragic story of a British couple living through their daughter’s drug addiction. It is much more than that — it is a book about infidelity, the narrator’s destructive relationship with her own mother, and it is a work of metafiction, detailing the unnamed, middle-aged narrator’s writing career.

On the first few pages, Ms. Myerson ensures that we experience the dread of living with a drug addict child: “I have these visions … of you lying alone somewhere, in some alley or ditch or squalid crack house bedroom, dead or ill or overdosing or bleeding and harmed.”

The author’s portrayal of drug hell is haunting and continues throughout the book. She takes us to rehabs and we experience relapses, and when things spin totally out of control, we tag along with the mother to a psychiatric hospital: “In this eerily bright, hot room, several men and women are sitting around in their dressing gowns and smoking cigarettes. When I come in, they all raise their heads and gaze at me with expressionless eyes.”

And then there is the unimaginable: “you described to us in some detail what you’d done in the back of someone’s car in order to get yourself a fix.” Their child’s addiction paralyzes the couple, delaying vacations and social outings, causing loss of sleep, and a drought in their own marriage.

In “Nonfiction,” Ms. Myerson eliminates adverbs and adjectives, presenting stripped-down, but vibrant, images. She does not use names and to create familiarity, the narrator refers to her daughter in the second person. The narrator tutors a fledgling author, providing this advice: write in the first person “to see if [you] can create a bit more attack and uncertainty” a method Ms. Myerson practices in “Nonfiction” when the narrator is not addressing her daughter.

She also specifies: “leave things out … you don’t need to explain the whole narrative,” because leaving the strongest part of the story hidden will spark the reader’s imagination.

Detailed trauma

Ms. Myerson is a master at detailing emotional trauma because she lived through a similar situation with her teenage son, detailed in her 2009 memoir “The Lost Child: A Mother’s Story.”

In that book, Ms. Myerson wrote about her son’s addiction to cannabis wreaking havoc in her home. She claims that he sold drugs to his younger brother, and he struck her, so when the pupil, in “Nonfiction,” queries the narrator: “Did you make it up or was it at all autobiographical?,” we can ponder if there is any detritus remaining from Ms. Myerson’s own experience. After all, she has a history of writing about what she knows and who she knows.

Ms. Myerson sprinkles in rendezvous with the narrator and an ex-lover, showing a void in the narrator’s life that her husband cannot satisfy, but nobody can help her now. Her daughter’s addiction leaves her powerless. She rejects a photographer’s request to take her picture because: “her photographs are all about what’s on the inside and I am a ghost, a blur, devoid of substance or heart. There is nothing real in me, nothing substantial or solid.” There are times when she is so depressed, she cannot get out of bed.

The narrator incorporates flashbacks of her own wretched childhood and passages about her contentious relationship with her deceased mother. Her mother inflicted emotional pain by pointing out her daughter’s foibles and worse, and she took pleasure in her granddaughter’s addiction.

Her depiction of the couple’s daughter sleeping on the streets and craving her next fix is both realistic and heartbreaking. Through her lean prose and her own experience, Ms. Myerson’s high-wire act of autofiction keeps us off balance, leaving us to wonder what is fact and what is fiction.

Wayne Catan is a freelance critic whose work has appeared in The New York Times, USA Today and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

First Published: January 8, 2024, 10:30 a.m.