fictional gay cowgirls broke my heart
This Week In Reading:
The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily M. Danforth
The brief lowdown: babygay comes of age in Miles City, Montana. Dead parents (this happens in like, chapter two, this is not a spoiler), beautiful cowgirls, VHS movie rentals and gay conversion therapy. There’s more, but that is the gist of it.
For someone that is not a cowgirl and did not grow up in a tiny town in Montana in the 90s, this book felt pretty #real. It just really nails the intensity of adolescence, what it means to be a gay girl (which is essentially: Girls Hurt Your Feelings over and over and over), the way that the people you love may not end up being the great loves of your life, and might instead just be catalysts for self-discovery and change-- and while that is important, it still makes you sad. The way that under duress, the most random of emotions bubble to the surface, emotions that clearly seem to be the wrong thing to be feeling. The self-directed pressure to react to trauma and your life in general "correctly." The way that even if you do not believe in-- or even reject, the things that surround you, they still inevitably shape you and your outlook on the world.
Anyways I loved this book, because of course I did. As many of you know from my junior year (or let’s be real, ongoing) cowboy art phase, I am obsessed with the American West, and that paired with gay feels, means that this was essentially targeted marketing towards my hyper specific cross section of interests. But I think people that do not share my niche interests will probably like it too! Emily M. Danforth allows for so much empathy for her characters. It would have been easy to villainize the evangelical leaders of the gay conversion clinic, but she doesn’t, and the book is stronger for it.
I don't read a lot of YA, but every time I do, I realize how much great lit is tucked away in the teen section. YA fiction gets a bad rep. Even now, writing this, I felt the need to distance myself from it, announce that generally "I don't read a lot of YA." As if to assert that my tastes are more adult, more refined, as if to prove that I am not some 13 year old girl pouring over a copy of New Moon.
But truly, so much great writing is hidden in the Young Adult section. Not just in terms of characters and plot and storytelling, but in terms of the writing itself. Literary writing, experimental writing, heartbreaking turns of phrase, perfect gems of sentences. What really distinguishes these books from adult fiction? Is having the protagonist be a teenager enough to make a book a teen book? Do we think that only other teenagers want to read about teens? What makes a book like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which is told from the perspective of a child, adult fiction and The Miseducation of Cameron Post teen lit?
Something Sam and I talk about a lot is the distinction between teen apocalypse movies and "adult" action sci-fi films. Why is the Hunger Games treated as teen blockbuster while the Matrix is considered a piece of serious cinematic canon? If Keanu Reeves was 10 years younger when they filmed the movie, would it be a teen movie? A broad argument, but one in going to make anyways: a lot of this seems tied to gender. It feels like the majority of our strong female leads are shunted into the YA genre. Katniss and that girl in Divergent (I don't care enough to look up her name, sorryyyyyy) are tough and strong, but we have decided that only pre-teens will care about them. There are definitely arguments to be made that the YA genre is not a negative label, and perhaps it does actually give young readers better access to compelling stories. But by labeling these books and movies as young adult stories, we emphasize that these characters are children, and by doing so, we seem to imply that they have less agency, or that their feelings and experiences are more trivial than the story arcs that occur in adult lit.
Anyways, we should probably all read more YA, you should probably read this book, and we should all probably feel less embarrassed about it.
Further Reading:
Have you read I'll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson? One of the counselors at Girl Scout camp gave me a copy last summer and it honestly gutted me. Beautifully, beautifully written: experimental and poetic and strange and heartbreaking. All about twins and codependency and jealousy and the ways we can do so much damage to the ones we love most. Anyways, go read that one.
Also, Dare Me by Megan Abbott (h/t Eleanor for the rec!) I don’t know if this is technically YA (but as previously established, these distinctions are meaningless), but it is about murder and cheerleaders and was deeply homoerotic and if that isn’t enough for you to want to read this I don’t think you understand me or my interests.