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. 

I read I Am the Cheese twice 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 my characters 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. 

It looks like I might have to watch Battlestar Galactica next, not just to face the traumatic loss of a whole potential life connected to it, but because Becca is going to get both my obsession with a show and that loss. This is going to be an entirely different book. Also they’re shooting the show at the Thrushcross Studios, so I get to reuse standing sets. I MEAN. Something like that. I need her to have access and there’s the studio right there. Oh no! I hate to do this even to a fictional character! Plus I’m going to melt down watching this show. You don’t even know. Unless you were there with me and you know. Then you too are braced for impact. What happens to a person when they love something so much and then it’s gone?