CBR Bingo square “Queer Lives”: The Miseducation of Cameron Post is a queer YA novel, and was banned in a middle school in 2015 in Delaware for “inappropriate language.” I mean, fuck that.
The novel was also criticised by the School Library Journal for its length and pacing, and my inclination is also to say fuck that, but I do understand that this is the kind of thing where YMMV. It did take a while to get into, but I was fully immersed when I did. I didn’t want it to end and I would love a sequel.
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If you look at Miles City, Montana, on Google Maps, and virtually move along its streets, you get a sense of overarching sky, dust and flatness, long long roads with no end and no beginning, barely interrupted by ponds and the Yellowstone River; the cars captured by Google’s cameras are mostly horse trailers and pick-up trucks. This is probably the closest I’ll ever get to where this novel is set (and where the author grew up), but I can kind of see how Big Sky might become claustrophobic and oppressive, how not being able to see the end of Main Street might mean it could feel like there’s nowhere to go.
The Miseducation of Cameron Post is about learning where to go–and how to go.
“We’re good at secrets”, I finally said. “It’s not like we ever have to tell anybody.” Irene didn’t answer, and in the dark I couldn’t quite make out what face she had on. Everything hung there in that hot, sweet smell while I waited for her to say something back. (11)
Virginia Woolf wrote in Orlando (1928) that
“Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second.”
Woolf didn’t (necessarily) mean queer as in an alternative to mainstream or traditional understandings of gender or sexual identity and the kind of linear thinking about time and space and history that is an accessory to these understandings; most likely she meant it as “strange”–but I think it works here both ways, as that’s how time works in The Miseducation of Cameron Post: the three years after Cameron is orphaned, left with her rigid aunt and kind but fairly clueless grandmother, pass by in a seeming blink, a blur of swim team and illicit drinking and weed and mild conflict with Cameron’s fundamentalist (perhaps extreme evangelical? I’m not entirely sure) Christian aunt. But Cameron slows down to watch, or perhaps memorise (she is writing from the past, after all) Coley Taylor’s every move:
“We’re just going to stay in and do nothing,” Coley said, checking her own reflection in the coat-hook mirror and then pulling the hood over her sweatshirt over her head and backing up until she fell over the arm of the couch and sprawled with her head and her trunk on the cushions and her legs in the air.” (174)
Coley is straight (or at least convinced that she is), and a cowgirl with an athlete boyfriend, and very much the prom queen type, and Cameron is awkward and difficult (hanging around with stoners in an abandoned hospital) and hopelessly in love with Coley and very aware of that hopelessness, to the point where she effaces herself and her desire as much as possible, waiting patiently, and hopelessly, for some sign from Coley that their friendship is more than friendship, that Coley sees her for who she really is, even if she doesn’t want her.
Cameron’s sense of herself and her desires is tangled up in guilt; her community is a small town in rural Montana where queerness is mocked at best and considered a sin, a perversion, a disease, a delusion, at worst–her first thought when she finds out that her parents have been killed in an accident is relief that they wouldn’t find out she’d just been kissing her friend Irene in a barn. It’s the early 90s; meanwhile, in Seattle, as her friend and summer fling Lindsey reminds her in letters and mixtapes, there are Riot Grrrls and Pride marches and a whole world of queer and anti-mainstream life. But Cameron finds it so hard to see beyond Coley, to picture a world and a life where her self doesn’t always have to be a secret clandestine thing that she doesn’t take the chance to escape when she could–and suddenly her self isn’t a secret any more, with dire consequences.
Cameron’s aunt sends her away to be fixed–and the rest of the novel is Cameron’s struggle to tread water, to find truth and beauty in herself and her friends and the world as they are. It’s a thorny novel, and a difficult read at times in the best possible way–Cameron is snarky and smart and achingly vulnerable, and what happens to her is wrong. But it’s also a beautiful novel, funny at times, about hope and being young and swimming under the blazing sun then drinking a cold Coke and sneaking liquor and kisses and inhaling music and films in an effort to understand yourself and your life.
Content note: This novel deals with homophobia and has an instance of quite graphically described self-harm.