39 I Am the Cheese

This week I'm reading the amazing novel I Am the Cheese by Robert Cormier. Please read it before listening! 

This novel is so upsetting. And I remembered it very differently from the way it actually is. I didn't understand it fully when I read it as a child, no surprise there. It's a complex narrative method on multiple levels, not just that it's alternating interview transcripts and direct narrative and memory, but because understanding and younger memory is involved as well as altered mental states. 

This book fits into a mental bookshelf that also includes A Separate Peace and Lord of the Flies and some others. It's also possible that the actual bookshelf belonged to my homeroom teacher (and brilliant English teacher) Mr. McDonald, who also got me hooked on Faulkner. 

What a funny category those Faulkner books belong to...because I was reading one at some orchestra festival, but someone kept stealing my copy, multiple days in a row. Who hated me (or Faulkner) that much? But was so secretive about it? What did they do with the books? I just kept getting another copy in homeroom the next morning. 

The funny part is, someone stole things from me at the local orchestra rehearsals, too. Probably the same person, right? But I just thought things disappeared, until years later when I put it together. They stole two different hats of mine, for example. Who steals hats and Faulkner paperbacks? Someone who is aggressively NORMATIVE, I would say. Stop being different! Stop being noticeable! 

Funny memory to assemble itself so many years later.

But if you've read this book, you know why memory and seeing things differently years later will come up for us. 

Anyway I'm reading I Am the Cheese for the second time because once I got to the end and had that WAIT, WHAT? moment, I had to see things again.

Trauma and memory and altered mental states. It's such an educational book for me to read right now as I'm trying to rejigger the Becca book before I dive into rewriting it. 

I tend to write poorly about people grappling with their childhood trauma. No way, right? Like they just go blank. They never face it. They never even really articulate things from their own experience, only from an adult perspective. That's not great. Cormier is extremely good at articulating childhood experience vividly and accurately. 

This book is perfect for me right now. I'm glad I own a copy finally, even though it's upsetting to the nth degree to read. 

Look at these various covers! The one is a little kid. One a little older, maybe junior high. The last one he's about fourteen or fifteen. In the book he seems like he's in his teens, so why this young child? And what is that matchbox next to him?