The author who wrote a controversial account of her son's descent into drug abuse has admitted that it was not the first time she had written intimately about her family.

For several years Julie Myerson wrote an anonymous newspaper column entitled Living with Teenagers, a warts-and-all account of the domestic travails of a middle-class London family that repelled and transfixed readers in equal measure.

Myerson, 48, more pilloried than praised for writing her new book, The Lost Child, has insisted that revelations of her elder son Jake's drug abuse were primarily designed to bring public attention to the “epidemic” of super-strength skunk cannabis.

Her detractors, however, say she is exploiting her son, now aged 20, and the young man in question has been quoted as calling her “insane”.

Until yesterday Myerson had denied all authorship of Living with Teenagers, which began life in 2006 and has since been made into a successful book. Yesterday she was asked three times by Janice Turner, an interviewer for The Times, to confirm her authorship of Living with Teenagers – and three times she denied it.

But later in the day she came clean. “I wrote Living with Teenagers,” she admitted in a statement. “I did so anonymously because I wanted to write truthfully, and that meant my children's identities had to be obscured.”

She added: “Although the aim of the column was to offer an honest picture of family life, some incidents were partly fictionalised, some details carefully rearranged and some characters composites, to conceal the identity of our children.” Despite those efforts, however, Myerson's children's identities were not obscured.

Her youngest son “Jack” in Living with Teenagers wrote a final instalment of the column in which he revealed he had been confronted by schoolfriends who had guessed his mother's secret. One of her earlier columns, on the subject of his pubic hair, led “Jack” to be branded “Mr Three Hairs” at school, he said. “Highlighting my puberty?” he wrote. “Surely my mum wouldn't stoop that low?”.

In her statement Myerson said: “Living with Teenagers and The Lost Child are very different things: one a collection of affectionate vignettes that I hoped would strike a chord with many parents, and the other a serious description of what happens when skunk cannabis bursts into a home.”

The Guardian, which published the column, removed all instalments from its website last night “to protect their privacy”. The column was also turned into a book, published last year by Hodder Headline. Bloomsbury, publisher of The Lost Child, has sought to capitalise on the interest in Myerson's domestic revelations by bringing publication forward by six weeks. The first edition goes to print today, while a second print run has been approved. As well as being a journalist and author of non-fiction, Myerson is also a novelist, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2003 for her book Something Might Happen.

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy