Featured Reading Guide
Julie Myerson
It s the summer holidays. And suddenly there s a strange boy at the bottom of Flynn s garden. Soon, she and her wayward brother Sam are walking out of the house in the middle of a hot summer s night and crossing four fields to find him again. But as well as the boy, Flynn and Sam find a whole gang of runaway kids. There s Diana, who s just had a baby. There s Mouse, who s only five and likes to set fire to things. And there is the boy himself, who stirs up feelings in Flynn that she s never felt before. But there s also someone else the unspeakably malign and terrifying presence they re all…
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Julie Myerson was born in Nottingham in 1960. She is the author of Sleepwalking (1993), The Touch (1996), Me and the Fat Man (1998) and Laura Blundy (2000). She lives in Clapham.
topAbout the Book
It s the summer holidays. And suddenly there s a strange boy at the bottom of Flynn s garden. Soon, she and her wayward brother Sam are walking out of the house in the middle of a hot summer s night and crossing four fields to find him again. But as well as the boy, Flynn and Sam find a whole gang of runaway kids. There s Diana, who s just had a baby. There s Mouse, who s only five and likes to set fire to things. And there is the boy himself, who stirs up feelings in Flynn that she s never felt before. But there s also someone else the unspeakably malign and terrifying presence they re all running from. Escaping him, they stumble on an amazing and extraordinary house by a waterfall, a house which seems to offer safety and meets their every desire and need or does it? The youngest character in the novel is one day old, and the oldest only seventeen. But the themes that lie at the heart of this ferociously original story are as adult, unsettling and universal as those of Julie Myerson s other novels.
topJulie Myerson interview/review
Extract from an interview with the Independent by Danuta Kean
Sunday, 10 February 2008
When Julie Myerson was 12, she would escape her parents’ collapsing marriage for the wild woods near home, with her two sisters in tow. Armed with paste sandwiches and bottles of pop, they would get lost in imaginative adventures designed to obliterate the trauma of family life. Thirty years later, faced with a teenage son succumbing to drug addiction, she has again sought refuge in a magical forest, this time of her own imagining. The result is Out of Breath, the beguiling story of a 13-year-old girl, Flynn, and a band of lost children who become entangled in one another’s lives in a far from innocent fairy tale.
‘We would do such dangerous things,’ Myerson recalls. ‘We used to get dressed up and stand by the side of the road at night going, wooo, wooo, like ghosts.’ She waves her arms and hunches her shoulders as if covered by an invisible white sheet. The waiter in the empty bistro we are in looks across. She giggles, embarrassed: ‘We probably caused accidents, because it was a quiet village road.’ Her voice is rapid, like her mind, which flits from distant memories to present-day pain like a sparrow criss-crossing a lawn in search of food. The memory masks distress: at home her father’s post-divorce bitterness led him to excise her mother’s face from every photograph before eventually committing suicide. Like Flynn, Myerson did not have a happy childhood.
Out of Breath is Myserson’s most personal book because it was written in response to a crisis rather than to a memory. ‘I don’t want to go into this too much, but we have been losing our eldest child to drugs and have had a terrible, terrible time for exactly the two years I have been writing this book,’ she confesses, though the unburdening appears to give no relief. Her son’s on-going problems overwhelmed her family. ‘It’s been a struggle. It has been the most traumatic thing that has ever happened to us.’
The trauma bit into her writing and work on a non-fiction book about a teenager, Mary Yelloly, who died in 1831, ‘ground to a halt’. ‘I was finding it all too sad, and this novel kept coming to me about a child who was also me,’ she explains.
Read the complete interview.
topStarting Points for Discussion
- ‘Some days I felt a hundred years old and full up with trying to know things.’ How does Myerson explore the pressures of adolescence through the novel?
- ‘I looked at Diana but she seemed in another world. A world of tiredness, she didn’t seem to care what we did. And Mouse was still grumbling about her birthday.’ How do Diana and Mouse deal with the trauma they have been through and how do their responses differ?
- What does Flynn mean by the ‘out-of-breath’ feeling and what significance might the phrase have in the light of the events of the book?
- Discuss the effect of responsibility on the characters. Which character do you think changes the most during the novel and why?
- How does Myerson capture the voice of someone on the cusp of childhood and adulthood?
- The central phase of the novel that takes place in the house by the waterfall requires a conscious suspension of disbelief. Does the magical realism of the novel work for you and what do you think Myerson’s aims were in compelling the reader to ‘make-believe’?
- ‘First my dad gone and now Sam. How could I be so careless as to lose a whole half of my family? Who would be next? Would Mum abandon me? Would Anna get an illness and die?’ Discuss the relationship between family and identity for each of the characters in the novel.
- How does the fact that there are no grown-ups in the novel affect the way the children behaviour? And how you view the novel?
- Why does the illusion fade to reveal the true state of the house once the group has rescued Mouse from the pool?
- ‘Suddenly I hated myself. I hated the droopiness of my voice and the way I couldn’t be normal when he was near me. His whole self was unbearably close to mine as well as unbearably far away’. Do you think Myerson’s evocation of teenage love is effective and what makes it particularly authentic?
- Out of Breath has been described by critics as ‘bittersweet’ (Guardian) and ‘sweetly corrupt’ (Sunday Telegraph). Did you find the overall tone of the book one of sadness or one of hope?
Other Books by Julie Myerson
Not A Games Person
PE. You either loved it or hated it, looked forward to it or dreaded it, but…
Out of Breath
It s the summer holidays. And suddenly there s a strange boy at the bottom of…
Sleepwalking
The eighth month of pregnancy proves difficult for Susan. Her remote and un…
Something Might Happen
On a Monday night in October in a small seaside town in Suffolk, a woman is …
The Story of You
It begins with snow, the story of you. A freezing room in a student house,…
The Touch
When Donna, Will and Gayle find Frank Chapman, a self-proclaimed healer and …
Suggested Further Reading
- Fade ~ Robert Cormier
- Play Nimrod for Him ~ Jean Ure
- The Time Traveller’s Wife ~ Audrey Niffenegger
- Monster Love ~ Carol Topolski
- Notes from an Exhibition ~ Patrick Gale