Emily Danforth’s Coming of Age Novel Hits Big

Author and Rhode Island College professor Emily M. Danforth’s debut novel, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, gives readers a fresh perspective on the LBGT coming of age story – or, as Danforth playfully refers to it on her Web site, a coming of GAYge story. Since its release earlier this year, Miseducation has garnered many positive reviews, including starred reviews from Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, and Booklist. Danforth spoke to GoLocalProv’s Avery Stone about her new novel.

Your protagonist Cameron and you are both born and raised Montana girls – Miseducation is set in your hometown. How much of this story is based on your lived experiences? Was the process of distancing yourself from your fiction difficult?

The most autobiographical elements in the novel are those of place. The landscape and culture of this small cattle town in eastern Montana (Miles City) is very present within the narrative, and certainly I drew, largely, from my own memories/experiences of being an adolescent there in the 1990s (when the novel is set). However, it is a fictionalized version of Miles City, so if you hope to use the novel as a kind of guidebook to plan a vacation, I’m afraid that you might find yourself rather disappointed. (Though the Bucking Horse Sale—an event featured in the novel—is very much an actual annual event.)

GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST

Cam’s sense of perpetually being on the periphery because of her emerging sexuality is certainly also drawn from my own experiences growing up gay in eastern Montana. I was so hungry for LGBTQ visibility in the culture around me, hoping to find, I think, some sense of community, that I, like Cam, became somewhat obsessed with seeking out queer images and representation in movies, novels, music, etc. However, in a host of important ways, Cameron Post is very unlike me (even adolescent me): she is an orphan; she is being raised by her devout, evangelical Aunt and her old-fashioned Grandmother; she is fairly willing to take risks, to exhibit a kind of bravery in her crushes on girls; and finally, she is eventually sent to a live-in conversion therapy program/boarding school. Not one of these things is true of my own past. 

Because Cameron’s voice eventually emerged so distinctly for me, it wasn’t terribly difficult to write fiction and not memoir, though my desire to keep a distance between us does account for some of the work I did in fictionalizing Miles City. Even just small things, like inventing a local attraction or changing a street or a location, helped me to remember to not just rely on my memories of my own experiences, but to be continually aware of Cameron’s character’s interpretation of things – the ways in which her own experiences are distinct from mine in so many crucial ways. Some friends and relatives have told me that they can hear my voice in Cameron’s, and I suppose that’s not terribly surprising, but I feel very strongly that her voice is really not my own. There are hundreds of moments of narration throughout the novel that, frankly, just don’t “sound like me.” Rather, those passages “sound like” Cameron—they’re her observations or remarks, funneled through her experiences.  

Why did you choose to tell Cam’s story in the form of a Young Adult novel?

Well, I don’t really think of Young Adult, or YA, as a “form” or a genre so much an umbrella term or marketing category. I set out to write a coming-of-age novel, and happily, it was embraced by a wonderful editor at Balzer+Bray, a YA imprint of HarperCollins. While all YA novels feature adolescent characters and often rites of passage or “coming of age” moments, that’s about where the unifying similarities end. There’s a very wide range of genres and subgenres that fall under the umbrella of YA, from paranormal to romance to paranormal romance to thriller, horror, contemporary, dystopian, steampunk, and any combination of those I’ve just mentioned (and more).

Some of these novels, like mine, are classified or marketed as “literary YA.” In his recent interview with Stephen Colbert, famed “children’s author” Maurice Sendak said, “I don’t write for children. I write, and somebody says that’s for children.” He was being a little bit cheeky, I think, but I appreciate his sentiment. I wrote a voice-driven coming-of-age novel and what I care about, most, is that it finds its way into the hands of readers who respond to that kind of fiction, be they fourteen or forty-three. 

It took two years for Miseducation to be published after you sold it to HarperCollins in 2010. Is this a normal time frame, or did you encounter any difficulties?

This is a pretty standard time frame for a first novel. Sure, some books are pushed to publication earlier, but two years for a debut is not at all unusual. There were no “difficulties” in the process. For the first six months or so I was working on some revisions with my editor (fairly minor revisions, really, some necessary trimming and tightening and adding an additional scene or two), but really it’s all the other components—the copyediting and design and marketing, etc, etc—that take up much of that time.

What is the most important lesson you would want readers –  especially teens – to take from your novel? 

I don’t read fiction for instruction (for lessons), and I don’t write it for that reason, either. I think fiction offers us the opportunity to fully inhabit other worlds, places, times, and lives in a way that, truly, no other forms of art or entertainment can match. In a first-person novel you’re transported to the mind of a particular character for hundreds of pages, and it really is, if you’re invested in the novel, a kind of transportation. You might be sitting on your couch in Rhode Island, reading a book, but at the same time you’re also in West Egg, or Winesburg, Ohio, or in the case of my novel, Miles City, Montana.

Flannery O’Connor, a fiction writer I so admire, said, basically, that if you can reduce a novel to a statement about it, or even a synopsis, then you can be sure it’s “not a very good novel.” What she was getting at was that in order for something to in fact be a novel, it shouldn’t be reducible—that’s why need all those words and pages, moments and scenes, in the first place. Henry James called novels “loose, baggy monsters” (a good thing), and John Gardner said that what gives a novel its weight, its power, is the “increasing connectedness of things,” and that kind of connectedness can only happen over pages and pages of accumulated scenes and moments of characterization, etc, etc.

I know that this answer isn’t very satisfying, though, so what I’ll say is that I hope that readers who knew little (or nothing) about conversion/reparative therapy find themselves informed (or ready to investigate on their own) by the end of the novel (and also, frankly, horrified and ashamed that we live in a culture that allows for these kinds of “therapies”). I also hope that readers, whether they identify LGBTQ, or not, recognize something of their own adolescent experiences in Cameron’s—confusing attractions, awkward fumblings in the back row of a movie theater, an intoxicating sense of ennui—and that her voice resonates with them for the length of the novel. 

Miseducation has already gotten many positive reviews. Is a book tour in your future?

I feel incredibly lucky to have received some truly generous reviews from various outlets: it’s been really thrilling.  I don't have an official book tour planned so much as a variety of stops I'll be making in various cities over the next several months. I just returned from Hendrix College in Arkansas where I spent the latter half of my "release week" as a Murphy Visiting Writer. In March I'll be reading as part of the Teen Book Festival in NYC, and then I'll have a reading in Boston in May. This summer I'll be reading all over, from the Nebraska Summer Writers Conference in Lincoln, NE, to my home state (and the state in which the novel is set) of Montana. For a more complete list of readings and events, feel free to check the readings page of my blog (which will continue to be updated).

Your novel is wrought with beautiful images. Would you ever want to see it as a feature film? 

Thanks very much for saying so. Of course I’d love to see The Miseducation of Cameron Post adapted for the big screen. Absolutely. Cam, as a character, is so movie-obsessed, and I’m not far behind her. Obviously films and novels are completely different mediums—wholly different ways of storytelling—but I think, so long as a writer goes into the process knowing that and refusing to be overly precious about his/her material, really interesting movies can emerge from the process of adapting a novel. I’ve played the “cast my book as a movie game” with lots of friends, though we often find ourselves casting the teenage versions of long-since-grownup actresses, like the teenaged Jodie Foster—from way back in her awkward Freaky Friday days—or Mary Stuart Masterson from back in her Some Kind of Wonderful days, as Cameron Post. Either could work well, I think (with the aid of a little time travel to allow for shooting).

Emily Danforth will be reading tonight at Rhode Island College from 6:30-8pm at the College's Faculty Center. For more details, go here. The MIseducation of Cameron Post is available at local bookstores, as well as via Amazon/Kindle, Indiebound, and Barnes & Noble/Nook.

For more Books, don't miss GoLocalTV, fresh every day at 4pm and on demand 24/7, here.