Julie Myerson

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Julie Myerson (born June 2, 1960) is an English novelist and sometime critic, born in Nottingham. Her novels are usually quite dark in mood, and show detailed psychological insight, sometimes suggesting the supernatural without being explicit.

She first came to national attention with a series of columns in The Independent. These were musings and reflections on family and on the everyday occurrences and fears of life. They often featured her husband, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter and director Jonathan Myerson, and their children Jacob, Chloe, and Raphael.

Myerson is a regular reviewer on the UK arts programme, Newsnight Review, on BBC2.

[edit] Novels

Sleepwalking 1994
The Touch 1996
Me and the Fat Man 1998
Laura Blundy 2000
Something Might Happen 2003
The Story of You 2006
Out of Breath 2007

Her first novel was Sleepwalking (1994), and it was to some degree autobiographical, in that it deals with the suicide of an uncaring and abusive father. The main character Susan is heavily pregnant and begins an affair. She also feels she is haunted by his father's mother, reliving the neglect that made him abusive.

In The Touch (1996) a group of young people try to help a tramp who preaches fundamentalist Christianity, and who turns violently against them.

In Me and the Fat Man (1999) a waitress takes to earning extra money giving oral sex in a park, though not out of necessity; she gets involved with two other men, friends who have an awkward relationship and a secret between them that turns out to be related to her own birth.

Laura Blundy (2001) is set in the Victorian period, and Julie Myerson tries to bring out the freshness and modernity of the period as it would have appeared at the time.

Something Might Happen (2003) is about a murder in a Suffolk seaside town.