THE Myerson family saga which has played out in the media this week has struck a little too close to home.

Writer and mum Julie Myerson has become the country’s latest She-Devil with the publication of her book detailing the tough-love approach she took to her eldest son’s drug taking.

Four out of the family of five have now written their own very public accounts of the family in crisis.

Julie wrote about how she and her Oscar-nominated screenwriter husband Jonathan Myerson threw their 17-year-old eldest child Jake out on the streets for smoking cannabis.

And now Julie has also admitted she was the anonymous author of the weekly Living With Teenagers column in The Guardian, a warts-and-all account of her three children’s often foul-mouthed and physically abusive behaviour.

The column came to an abrupt end after her children discovered their private lives were being written about in colourful detail in a national newspaper.

It turned out her kids’ friends had guessed months before.

When the column was pulled by the editors, her youngest son wrote a piece in The Guardian about how he had been the victim of playground bullying after his mother wrote intimate details about him reaching puberty.

Ever since, he said, his nickname at school had been ‘four pubes’.

That was two years ago, but despite speculation and denials, it was only in this week’s controversy over her new book Julie Myerson finally admitted to writing the column and it was removed from The Guardian website to protect the children’s privacy, although it’s still available in book form.

In the latest row, the Myersons have come in for criticism after throwing Jake out of the family home for smoking skunk, a stronger form of cannabis.

They defend their actions saying his addictive, abusive behaviour and drug taking were affecting their other children and causing the breakdown of family life.

And that the bigger issue they wanted to raise was about awareness of the growing and dangerous use of skunk and its affect on the mental health of a whole generation of children.

Now Jake has joined in the row, claiming both his parents had volatile tempers and rows in the family home were ‘50/50′.

He says his parents over-reacted to his smoking cannabis, which he claimed was ordinary teenage behaviour.

Personally, I wouldn’t disagree the Myersons are well-placed to write about teenage drug taking and how it causes family breakdown.

As writers, they can articulate what thousands of families are going through. And their experience shows drug taking is not a class issue.

Their son was one of the brightest in his school until he started using skunk.

I’m fine with all that.

But for me, writing a newspaper column every week about family life, I think Julie Myerson has gone too far.

She was naïve, first of all, to believe her children’s anonymity wouldn’t be blown when she was writing about them in such lurid detail in The Guardian.

And if raising awareness of drugs issues was the real motive behind the book, why wait three years to write about it? And why use real names this time?

I may not be in Julie Myerson’s league, but I know from experience when I sit down to write this column every week that it’s always easiest to write about what’s happening in my life at the time.

When it gets tricky is when stuff’s happening around me that I can’t write about.

A family crisis may make juicy copy, but there is a very fine line to be trod.

It’s fine when it’s a happy event. I only missed writing two weeks’ columns when my youngest son was born.

And before that I could hardly contain myself when I found out I was pregnant.

But I had to abandon the column completely for about three years when my life fell apart because of divorce.

The difficult bit is judging where to draw the line so that I don’t hurt and offend my loved ones.

If this column is going to be in the least bit interesting it’s got to be personal and true.

And I’m more than happy to write about what a useless mother and generally batty old woman I am.

Generally I’m on fairly safe ground writing about the funny, odd little things my youngest child says and does.

Although one week I wrote something jokey about him getting blue paint all over the bathroom and somebody at school mentioned it to him.

When he got home he was confused and wanted to know why he was in the news for making a mess. I felt awful.

It’s even more of an issue when it comes to my older children.

They deserve privacy as they move from being teenagers into becoming young adults.

Luckily for me, my children don’t often read the Herald Express (and I make a point of not bringing a copy of Thursday’s paper home) so they rarely see my column.

I also never mention them by name, and I write using my maiden name, which is not my children’s surname.

But, most importantly, and this is where I believe Julie Myerson has gone wrong, I try not to write anything that will hurt them.

Yes, I know, I often make wry comments and passing asides about the difficulties of raising teenagers (especially as a single mum). But I rarely go into detail.

I joke about the fact my children have a team of lawyers poised to sue me at the slightest hint of libel.

But if I’m serious, I think they, like Jake Myerson, need privacy most of all when they mess up.

I don’t want to write a column which makes my children sound like perfect little angels and gives the impression that I’m some kind of supermum. How ridiculous would that be?

But at the same time, I can’t use their adolescent mistakes as material for my column.

In The Sunday Times this week Minette Marrin said Julie Myerson’s new novel was a ‘betrayal not just of love and intimacy, but also of motherhood itself’, claiming she was a writer first and a mother second.

And Tim Lott in The Independent called the book a moral failure, adding: ‘Julie has betrayed Jake for her own ambition’.

When I’m in the middle of a family crisis, the last thing I do is rub my hands and reach for my laptop.