Myth of You and Me (Stewart)

The Myth of You and Me
Leah Stewart, 2005
Crown Publishing
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400098071


Summary
When Cameron was fifteen, she and Sonia were best friends—so close it seemed nothing would ever come between them. Now Cameron is a twenty-nine-year-old research assistant with no meaningful ties to anyone except her aging boss, noted historian Oliver Doucet.

Nearly a decade after the incident that ended their friendship, Cameron receives an unexpected letter from her old friend. Despite Oliver’s urging, she doesn’t reply. But when he passes away, Cameron discovers that he has left her with one final task: to track down Sonia and hand-deliver a mysterious package to her.

The Myth of You and Me captures the intensity of a friendship as well as the real sense of loss that lingers after the end of one. Searingly honest and beautiful, it is a celebration and portrait of a friendship that will appeal to anyone who still feels the absence of that first true friend. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1973
• Where—Laughlin Air Force Base, Texas, USA
• Raised—Virginia, Idaho, Kansas, New Mexico (USA); England, UK
• Education—B.A., Vanderbilt University; M.F.A., University of
   Michigan
• Awards—National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship
• Currently—lives in Cincinnati, Ohio

Leah Stewart was born in 1973 at Laughlin Air Force Base in Texas, where her father was stationed. As a child, she lived in Virginia, Idaho, England, Kansas, and Virginia again. She went to high school in Clovis, New Mexico, a town featured in her second novel, The Myth of You and Me. She always wanted to be a writer, as evidenced by her college application essay.

At Vanderbilt University Leah was the editor of the student newspaper, the Vanderbilt Hustler, and spent summers interning for the Tennessean in Nashville and the Commercial Appeal in Memphis. The latter experience inspired her first novel, Body of a Girl. After college, Leah went to the MFA program at the University of Michigan, and then moved to Boston, where she put her master’s degree to work by taking a job as a secretary for the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She had an office with a door, and she wrote most of her first novel there.

Since then, Leah has worked as a secretary at Duke, a cataloguer in a used bookstore, a magazine editor, a copyeditor, and a staff member at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She has been a visiting professor at Vanderbilt University, Sewanee, and Murray State University. The recipient of a 2010 NEA Literature Fellowship, Leah teaches in the University of Cincinnati’s creative writing program, and lives in Cincinnati with her husband and two children. (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
The Myth of You and Me is an intricately constructed, heartfelt story about the death of an intense friendship.
Boston Globe


A smart, exceedingly well-written story about the mysteries at the heart of even the most intimate friendships between women. You’ll be reading into the wee hours.
People


Stewart peers into the complicated heart of friendship in a moving second novel (after 2000's Body of a Girl). Ever since a cataclysmic falling out with her best friend, Sonia, after college, Cameron's closest companion has been Oliver, the 92-year-old historian she lives with and cares for in Oxford, Miss. Oliver's death leaves Cameron alone and adrift, until she discovers that he has given her one last task: she must track down her estranged best friend (whose letter announcing her engagement Cameron had so recently ignored) and deliver a mysterious present to her. Cameron's journey leads her back to the people, places and memories of their shared past, when they called themselves "Cameronia" and swore to be friends forever. It was a relationship more powerful than romantic love—yet romantic love (or sex, anyway) could still wreck it. Stewart lures the reader forward with two unanswered questions: What was the disaster that ended their friendship, and what will be revealed when Cameron and Sonia are together again and Oliver's package is finally opened? The book is heartfelt and its characters believable jigsaw puzzles of insecurities, talents and secrets, and if Cameron's carefully guarded anger makes her occasionally disagreeable, readers will nevertheless welcome her happy ending.
Publishers Weekly


Cameron Wilson, 14, is an overly tall army brat and a new kid in town. She begins an intense friendship with classmate Sonia Gray after the two meet while literally saving one another from disastrous situations. The friendship blows up in college.... Then a letter arrives from Sonia.... Cameron chooses to do nothing until Oliver dies and leaves a package for her to deliver personally to Sonia. So begins Camerons journey to find and understand her lost friend and, ultimately, herself. The novel unfolds at an unhurried, graceful pace, moving through flashbacks and memories...and Stewarts notion that friendship can define a life. A poignant and bittersweet story of love. —Jane Halsall, McHenry Public Library District, IL
School Library Journal


(Starred review.) At 30, Cameron Wilson lives in virtual seclusion with Oliver Doucet, an elderly historian who can't understand why the bright, beautiful young woman seems to be hiding from the world. When...Sonia Grey, sends Cameron a letter out of the blue,...Cameron refuses to answer.... Oliver passes away two months later, [and] he leaves behind a...package [Cameron] must deliver to Sonia.... Stewart's writing is sharp and observant, making this tale of the complexities of friendship affecting and genuine. Kristine Huntley
Booklist

Discussion Questions
1. How would you describe the relationship between Oliver and Cameron? Is it purely a familial one, or are there romantic undertones? What creates such a tight bond between them?

2. What do you think made Sonia write to Cameron? Can you imagine writing such a letter? What does Sonia mean when she says, “Sometimes without you to confirm these memories I feel like I’ve invented them”?

3. Oliver believes that “all times exist simultaneously,” a concept Cameron returns to several times over the course of the novel. What does Oliver mean by this? How is this notion at odds with Cameron’s statement, on page 215, that “once you know the end of the story, every part of the story contains that end, and is only a way of reaching it”? Which of these ideas strikes you as most true?

4. Why does Oliver force Cameron to seek out Sonia? What does he want for Cameron’s life?

5. On page 51, Cameron says, “To belong nowhere is a blessing and a curse, like any kind of freedom.” What do you make of this? How have her frequent moves shaped her? How have they affected her worldview? How might she be different if she’d lived her entire life in one place?

6. What connection does Cameron make between her personality and her height? How does she imagine her height causes others to see her?

7. What role does Sonia’s dyscalculia play in her life? How has it affected her idea of her herself? Her approach to the world? Why do you think she chooses to let Cameron in on this secret, and what’s the effect on Cameron when she tells her?

8. How are Cameron and Sonia shaped by their relationships with their parents?

9. Do you think that what Sonia did to end her friendship with Cameron is forgivable? Why or why not? Why do you think she did it? Why does Cameron find it so difficult to forgive? Is what Cameron did in response forgivable?

10. What draws Cameron to Will? Should Cameron be held responsible for her feelings for Will when he was Sonia’s boyfriend, even though she didn’t act on them? When she meets him again as an adult, why are her feelings so hard for her to express?

11. Sonia tells Cameron on page 205: “You’re a dreamer who doesn’t believe in the dream.” What does she mean by this? How do you see this play out in Cameron’s behavior?

12. Which of the two friends do you sympathize with more, Cameron or Sonia? At which points in the novel do you most sympathize with Sonia? With Cameron? At which points do you sympathize with them the least? Why?

13. In the prologue, Sonia tells Cameron that every decision we make affects the rest of our lives. Do you think this is true? What are the crucial decisions in Cameron’s life? Sonia’s? Oliver’s? Why did they make them?

14. Why are friendships between teenage girls so intense? What brings Cameron and Sonia together? What does each bring to the friendship? What does each get out of it?

15. On page 114, Cameron says that these intense teenage friendships can’t last. Is this true? Why or why not?

16. What kind of relationship do you imagine Sonia and Cameron having after the end of the novel? Have they begun a new phase of their friendship, or simply achieved closure?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

top of page (summary)