NONFICTION

An English writer’s life descends into chaos as her daughter develops a drug addiction.

“There’s a night—I think this is the middle of June—when we lock you in the house,” begins Myerson’s winkingly titled novel. The “you” addressed throughout is the protagonist’s daughter; through Myerson’s intercutting narratives, we see the daughter as a bright, friendly child, later to turn violent, withdrawn, and unpredictable in the throes of IV drug use. The narrator also tells the story of her relationship with her own cruel mother, whose cold and critical demeanor finally ends in an estrangement that lasts until the older woman dies. (The narrator is barred from her funeral.) Squeezed between the dual pressures of being mother to a difficult child, and daughter to a difficult mother, the narrator begins to question everything she believes about family life as well as everything she knows about writing, attempting to mentor a young writer while trying to keep her life from collapsing. Finally, there is the “he”—a man in the narrator’s past who swoops in and offers a tempting (and self-sabotaging) reprieve. Myerson has already published a memoir that looked frankly at her son’s addiction (The Lost Child: A Mother’s Story, 2013), which was a source of controversy in the U.K. (The novel’s opening sentence is one of dozens of close parallels between fictional and real events.) To title the novel Nonfiction feels less like a middle finger to critics and more like self-flagellation. The narrator is a bottomless well of self-pity, the book pressing an old bruise by imaginatively unspooling what was surely a real-life nightmare into a full-blown artistic obsession. On the one hand, this can make for emotionally claustrophobic reading; on the other, it feels, ultimately, like the truth.

Both confounding and compelling.