'The Miseducation of Cameron Post' by emily m. danforth

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The Miseducation of Cameron Post is a difficult novel to summarize.  So much happens between its covers: Cameron's recognition of her attraction (both emotional and physical) to other girls; a car accident that kills both of her parents when she's only 12 years old; the inevitable changes her life undergoes when her aunt Ruth becomes her legal guardian; the short, but intense, love affair with Coley Taylor, the town's golden girl; and Ruth sending Cameron to an evangelical boarding school that promises to change Cameron's sexuality.  In emily m. danforth's hands, it's a quiet, multi-layered novel where a young woman looks back over her teenaged years with the eye of someone who's not only older, but much, much wiser.  

If the idea that a teenaged girl coming out as a lesbian would be shocking, danforth set The Miseducation of Cameron Post in the early 1990s, before Friends featured Ross' lesbian ex-wife and her wife as something so normal, it bordered on the mundane.  That was a rarity on prime time television then.  So for Cameron Post to identify as a lesbian in 1991 in small-town Montana, it constitutes an earth-shattering event.

The novel is quiet in its tone, so when the big moments arrive, they land with the force of a thunderclap on a quiet evening.  Appropriately, those moments are also act as catalysts that force Cameron onto a path that isn't always of her choosing.  

The first two-thirds of the book outline Cameron's exploration of her sexuality from the first chaste kisses with her friend Irene to the furtive explorations with Lindsay, a fellow competitive swimmer to the explosive relationship with Coley that pulls the novel into the final third, which takes place at Promises, the evangelical gay-conversion therapy boarding school where Ruth ultimately sends Cameron to "cure" her, in an increasingly painful year as the leaders of the school take everything about their students and attempt to turn it into something evil and dirty.

It's the last third of the novel where the complexity matures.  One one hand, it's impossible not to feel indignant rage at the treatment of the students at Promises.  And yet...  To Lydia and Rick, the leaders, as well as the students' parents and guardians, Promises is what will save their children from eternal damnation.  That's what gives this part of the novel an underlying bitterness: they're doing it from a place of love, albeit a love that ultimately proves destructive.  It's not a love I recognize

The spare, wistful tone of the novel makes it difficult to even categorize The Miseducation of Cameron Post as a YA novel.  It doesn't feel like a YA novel.  It has more in common with so-called literary fiction (aka "adult fiction").  This isn't a bildungsroman, where Cameron is in search of herself. Cameron knows who she is, thank you.  She really just needs to find a place that will allow her to be.

For Cameron, "miseducation" applies to so many things.  One of the notable instances of Cameron's miseducation is Lindsay's insistence there is a narrow definition of a "real" lesbian.  Lindsay only spends summers in Miles City, and lives in Seattle the rest of the year.  Her sense of security (namely that she won't be sent to a gay-conversion school) allows her to freely express her sexuality with all the certainty that her way is "right."  The other, of course, is Promises and their assertions that everything about Cameron, from her "masculine" name to the way her parents raised her, are the external nudges that have made her a lesbian.

Give The Miseducation of Cameron Post a try.  This lovely, lyrical novel shouldn't be missed.