Book Review: The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily M. Danforth

I’m not sure if the world needs a review for a book published in 2012, but I sure do. This book came along at exactly the right time, and I devoured it in less than two weeks–which is fast for me, especially since that I found it on a list of really long-ass YA books.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post, a YA contemporary novel about a girl from a small town in Montana who gets caught in a sexual relationship with another girl and is sent to a Christian gay conversion camp, clocks in at 142,050 words. (Which is coincidentally 1000 words shorter than my manuscript at its longest.) One review said that it was originally double the length and is only the first half of the story, and if that’s true then I demand the second half pronto. 142k words were not nearly enough to satisfy me.

That could be partially due to the rather abrupt ending–though still, in hindsight, a complete ending, nicely capping the themes presented in the novel. It could also be because of the dreamy, lackadaisical pace of the narrative as it moves through main character Cameron’s life, starting with the summer her parents died in a freak auto accident and continuing through beautifully-realized moments of her sexual awakening, where Danforth not only digs deep into the fumbles and butterflies of young love, but lingers on the textures of life in a small western town in the early 1990s. Some reviewers complained that it’s slow, but I found it transfixing because of how authentic it feels. As I read I lamented that if Danforth did not actually grown up in Miles City, Montana, I was going to quit writing, because how can I possibly live up to the level of journalistic dedication required to present such a realistic setting in all its tarnished glory? Having recently driven lengthwise through the state and spent several days in the general area of the fictional gay conversion camp, I could feel the authenticity as sharply as a midsummer chill blowing down from the Spanish Peaks. When I reached the end and learned that she was in fact born and raised in Miles City, I’m pretty sure I laughed with relief.

Despite the high-concept sounding summary, this book is not that plot-focused. It’s more character-driven, atmospheric and emotional, about Cameron’s coming to terms with herself and the twists and turns of her life. I’m not really sure if coming of age can even be high concept. Obviously the subject matter offers a lot to chew on, but Danforth’s treatment of the evangelical Christian camp is incredibly nuanced. Even though the narrative rests squarely on the side of the children subjected to its terrible–as Cameron puts it, pseudoscientific–“treatment,” this is no a diatribe. Danforth presents the counselors (a young “ex-gay” reverend and his icy psychologist aunt), as rounded characters who truly believe their actions are in the children’s best interests. The harm they’re actually doing boils the blood in places, because I feel like I know these people, grew up with versions of them: normal, well-intentioned people who do terrible things in the name of faith. Yet despite their faith, sometimes you can see the cracks in the veneer that reveal their humanity. After a particularly horrifying incident where a devout student mutilates himself because of his lack of de-gaying progress, the reverend has no words for Cameron’s demand for answers and bursts into tears.

It’s stunning to me that a YA about such a huge, important, and–to some people–controversial topic could be so nuanced. It’s everything I want in a YA, everything I’ve been looking for. I want to read more books like this, where readers aren’t told what to think or how to feel, but are presented with a situation and allowed to live it along with the characters, using the power of story to make important statements about human nature and the world we inhabit.

In short, it’s everything I want my YA manuscript to be and very fervently hope that it is.

This book couldn’t have come at a better time for me. For the past month I’ve been stalling, knowing that my manuscript is done and I have to start sending it out, but still trying to trim more off the word count. I know now I need to stop and let it go, and not just because I found a very very long bestselling contemporary novel that was recently made into a movie. I’ve learned, through massive amounts of trial and error, that to cut any more would be to alter the foundations of the story, and some stories, I think, demand a longer word count. I’m trying to portray a complex issue from as many different angles as possible. I want to acknowledge what I’ve come to understand about people’s infinite capacity for good, and their equally-infinite capacity for evil:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

I’m glad I found this book. It’s the first YA I’ve really connected to in a long time, and one of the best books I’ve read this year. And, despite its length, I was so, so sad when it ended. Its beauty and honesty swept me away. If there is such as thing as the fictive dream, The Miseducation of Cameron Post resides solidly within it.

Anton Chekhov on Description of Setting

“In my opinion a true description of Nature should be very brief and have a character of relevance. Commonplaces such as, ‘the setting sun bathing in the waves of the darkening sea, poured its purple gold, etc.’ – ‘the swallows flying over the surface of the water twittered merrily, etc’ – such commonplaces one ought to abandon. In descriptions of Nature one ought to seize upon the little particulars, grouping them in such a way that, in reading, when you shut your eyes you get a picture.

For instance, you will get the full effect of a moonlight night if you write that on the milldam a little glowing star-point flashed from the neck of a broken bottle, and the round black shadow of a dog, or a wolf, emerged and ran, etc. Nature becomes animated if you are not squeamish about employing comparisons of her phenomena with ordinary human activities, etc.”

–Letter to Alex P Chekhov, Babkin. May 10 1886.

(via Comma Press via The White Page)

Writing Without a Map: In Which I End Up Exactly Where I’m Supposed to Be

Downtown Griffin, GA by Amber Rhea

Setting out to write a novel is a lot like setting out on a roadtrip. Everyone does it differently. Some people collect maps and make plans, some have only a destination in mind, others don’t even know that much. For them, it’s the journey that matters, destination left up to the whim of chance.

My husband is a planner. Yesterday morning, when we decided we were going to drive an hour and a half south of Atlanta to one of those wild animal safari parks (where zebras and bison slobber on your windshield), he printed off pages of directions, complete with three different maps in varying levels of detail. Having navigated four weeks of Europe with nothing but Rick Steve’s guidebook and a keen sense of direction, I laughed at his lack of faith and tossed the maps on the floor with the Egg McMuffin wrappers.

“It’s just one road the entire way,” I told him. “Stay on I-85 until you hit LaGrange.”

Forty minutes later, after dissecting the themes of both Breaking Bad and There Will Be Blood, my husband asked what exit we were looking for. And, because my sense of direction is good but apparently not good enough, I immediately started getting a Really Bad Feeling About This.

Two minutes later, we’re pulling off the highway.

“You were supposed to navigate!” he said, frantically pulling up Google Maps on his phone.

“You were supposed to stay on I-85!”

We weren’t on I-85. Not even close. According to Google, it was going to take us another hour and a half to get to the animal park, cutting through what appeared to be a glitch: no roads, no towns, just a massive wedge of nothing between where we were and where we were supposed to be.

(To be fair, staying on I-85 involved taking an exit somewhere near the airport. I just wasn’t paying enough attention to tell him that.)

#

This sort of thing happens to me a lot–and not just whenever my husband and I decide to get into a car together. As of late, my subconscious has been leading me down some pretty strange streets.

Writers may know what I’m talking about: make a plan, and prepare yourself to go waaaaay off-course. It’s almost like daring your writer-subconscious. “I’ll show you,” you think in your more lucid moments, while your subconscious is muttering, “We’ll see about that.”

I learned to trust my writer-subconscious a long time ago. It knows what’s up.

Most of the time, when I stare at the screen and nothing comes out, it’s because I have nowhere to go, and sure enough, the more I force it, the more we go wandering around in confused little plot circles. And when words pour like crazy, leading me further and further from my nice neat list of bulleted points, I know better than to try and yank it back on track. I’ve been sucking up stories for almost twenty-seven years now, so I’d like to think there’s a part of my brain that knows what it’s doing.

(Hopefully not connected to the part of my brain that knows where it’s going–because if our little roadtrip is any indication, that part needs some work.)

For some time now I’ve been trying to understand what’s been going on with WIP as of late, and a roadtrip is an excellent metaphor. Since 2007 this thing has squirted out of me in various forms and genres, all centered on one guy who lands himself in prison for a terrible, terrible crime. I don’t know why this guy fascinates me but I keep coming back to him, even when it doesn’t seem healthy or make a lick of sense.

Together, we’ve walked some strange roads, but none so strange as the ones we’ve walked this past year. For all of my plans, my notebooks full of dialogue, plot points, and description, I would never have planned on coming here, never in my wildest dreams thought my subconscious would bring me right back where I started: a fictional version of my hometown in all its illogical, country-fried glory.

#

Five minutes after my husband and I found ourselves tragically, hopelessly, and unapologetically lost, we ended up in Griffin, Georgia–a town I am sure you will recognize as the filming location of Sundance Channel’s Rectify, my favorite and arguably the best show of 2013 (which is saying a lot cos this year’s been great for television).

And I never would have gone there of my own volition because it’s way out in the middle of freaking nowhere.

Rectify is about Daniel Holden, a man released from Death Row after 20 years due to some murky DNA evidence, and his return to the southern town of his childhood raises questions about guilt, innocence, punishment and forgiveness that I recognized the moment it started–same as I recognized the town where it was filmed.

“Oh my god, that’s the graveyard where they beat the crap out of him,” I said, in much the same tone I used in the presence of Shakespeare’s birthplace and Hadrian’s Wall. “I can’t believe it’s right there beside the road.”

And, about two minutes later: “Look at that! That’s the cute little street, with the bookstore and Susan’s beauty parlor. Did they even do any set dressing? It looks exactly like the show.”

And so on, with the gas station where Daniel buys Smart Water and wonders if it actually makes people smart, and the creek, ten minutes outside of town, where Hannah was murdered. “Creeks kinda all look the same, you know,” my husband tried to reason, but I knew better. This was definitely the creek.

I tried to imagine what it would be like to grow up here, in a town even more rural than mine, what it’d be like to come back after twenty years and try to find your bearings. We moved to North Georgia when I was eight. I’ve never felt like I really belonged. Maybe bringing my characters home helps me define not only who they are, but who I’ve become, as well.

Ray McKinnon, creator of Rectify, might understand. He grew up in Adel, South Georgia, a place probably not so different from the fictional Paulie he created for the show. And like all good Southern Gothic towns, the Paulie of Rectify is a character that exerts a will all its own.

For years I’d tried to set my story of guilt, innocence, punishment and forgiveness in a town that looked like everywhere but could only come up with a hazy shade of nowhere. It wasn’t until I committed to a real place–a place real enough to me, at least–that my story finally started to come around.

How important is setting to your stories? According to agent and author Donald Maass, a setting with character is an essential quality of breakout fiction. How much of your settings comes from personal experience, and how important is personal experience to your writing in general?