43 pages • 1 hour read
Emily M. DanforthThe Miseducation of Cameron Post
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Summer 1989”
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
It is the summer of 1989 in Miles City, a sleepy Montana town. The narrator Cameron Post describes the day her parents die. She and her best friend Irene Klauson are nearly 13. Cameron’s Grandma Post drops her and Irene off at swim practice. Grandma Post is “minding” (3) Cameron while her parents are away on a camping trip at Quake Lake, the same site her mother almost died as a little girl during the Montana-Yellowstone earthquake. In the parking lot, Irene and Cameron fall into their competitive habits until they both remember their secret—that they have kissed—and grow sheepish with one another. After a day of swimming, shoplifting, and stolen kisses, the two girls go back to Irene’s family ranch for a sleepover. A late-night phone call awakens the household. Cameron’s life changes after Irene’s father knocks at the door: “I still had parents before that knock, and […] I didn’t after” (24). Cameron learns her parents have died in a car crash.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary
Days after the car accident, concerned neighbors stop by Cameron’s house with copious amounts of food. Grandma Post thanks them politely but keeps them away from Cameron. Cameron recalls with guilt that on the night her parents died, she felt relief that they would never find out about her kissing Irene. Irene calls Cameron several times, but Cameron refuses to speak to her. Cameron throws away the card that Irene writes to her, though she memorizes every word, most notably: “I love you” (31).
Cameron’s Born-Again Christian aunt comes to stay. Ruth, a former flight attendant, quits her job and relocates from Florida to help look after Cameron. While Grandma Post and Ruth are out shopping, Cameron moves the TV and VCR from her parents’ bedroom into hers. She also takes a wad of money, the 1959 photo of her mother at Rock Creek Campground after she survived the earthquake, and a dollhouse her father made for her when she was 5. Cameron bikes to the video store and rents Beaches, a film she and her mother enjoyed together.
Aunt Ruth suggests that Cameron pray. Cameron questions if God is punishing her for kissing a girl. She then contemplates her own faith, thinking that destiny, not God, may predetermine life. Cameron concludes that Christianity may not be her answer: “I don’t think it’s overstating it to say that my religion of choice became VHS rentals” (40).
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary
In the first semester of seventh grade, Cameron begins attending grief counseling at school, though she maintains that renting videos is her real therapy. Despite her estrangement from Irene, Cameron agrees to go to the Custer County Fair with her. The girls ride the Ferris wheel. Cameron initially lets Irene take her hand but pulls away when she starts to desire Irene again. Cameron tells Irene that they cannot be friends like they were before. When Irene asks her why, Cameron says nothing: “[I]t wasn’t my place to do it for her […] to explain that everybody knows how things happen for a reason, and that we had made a reason and bad, bad, unthinkable things had happened” (45-46). Cameron and Irene pretend to be friends at school, though Irene increasingly spends time with other people and dates a boy. Cameron makes a habit of watching movies that center lesbian relationships, like Personal Best.
Ruth travels to Florida to sell her condominium and have routine surgery to remove a neurofibromatosis lump on her back. Cameron’s mother’s childhood friend Margo Keenan, a semi-pro tennis player who now lives in Germany, takes Cameron out to dinner. Margo informs Cameron that it was Margo’s family who convinced Cameron’s mother’s family to camp at Quake Lake the night of the earthquake. Margo offers Cameron some old childhood photos of her mother. Cameron selects three photos of her parents, then steals a photo of Margo when Margo is in the bathroom. Margo expresses her love for Cameron’s mother and her remorse at her passing. She also apologizes for not staying connected and urges Cameron to contact her if she ever needs anything.
Irene Klauson’s family gains wealth and celebrity for finding dinosaur fossils on their property. Irene smugly announces that she will attend boarding school on the East Coast. Cameron visits Irene to say goodbye. Cameron wants to revoke what she said on the Ferris wheel, but doesn’t. Irene suggests that Cameron apply to the same boarding school she is going to. Cameron reasons that she was born and raised in Montana, but Irene counters this: “There’s no rule that says you have to stay in the place that you’re born. It’s not like it makes you a bad person if you want to try something new” (61). The girls part ways.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary
At Christmastime, Ruth tries to arrange all festivities as they were when Cameron’s parents were alive. This makes Cameron feel worse instead of better. Cameron becomes increasingly sarcastic with Ruth.
Ruth switches the family to a new church called Gates of Praise, a place Cameron notes looks more like a factory than a house of worship. Ruth insists that Cameron join Firepower, a teen group at the church. Cameron struggles with accepting Gates of Praise’s absolute ideology: “[R]ather than making me certain of its correctness, it made me question, and doubt, all the more” (68).
After returning from Firepower, Cameron scans the Bible for passages on homosexuality. Although the Bible only mentions male homosexuality, her Extreme Teen Bible explicitly notes that this mention applies to any forms of same-sex attraction and same-sex acts.
Cameron watches Fatal Attraction while gluing various trinkets she found—a piece of purple fluorite from her Earth Science classroom, a Nixon campaign, a thermometer magnet of praying Jesus—to the dollhouse her father made her. Of her strange new art project, Cameron says, “It felt really good to do something that made no sense at all” (72).
Chapters 1-4 Analysis
Chapters 1 through 4 comprise the book’s Part 1, “Summer 1989.” They outline main character Cameron Post’s central concerns, as well as a pivotal moment in her life: the simultaneous death of her parents and her first homosexual experience. Cameron struggles with queer shame at the same time as she grapples with tragedy, outlining the moral and religious quandary she wrestles with throughout the book.
In these chapters, Danforth introduces the reader to key relationships that scaffold Cameron’s coming-of-age narrative. There’s Irene, Cameron’s first kiss, who forces Cameron to confront her burgeoning same-sex attraction. Aunt Ruth’s well-meaning yet dogmatic religious beliefs bring Cameron to question faith and fuel her resistance to absolutism in any form. We begin to see the increasing power struggle between Ruth and Cameron, foiled by the easy-goingness of Cameron’s grandmother, who is a touchstone of comfort in Cameron’s uncertainty. Cameron’s fascination with Quake Lake as both the site of her mother’s childhood near-death experience and final resting place prompts Cameron’s internal investigation of destiny. This questioning plays into the book’s greater coming-of-age theme and represents the building of worldviews typical of adolescence.
Cameron’s escapism into film serves as a coping mechanism for her grief. Cameron’s art making, by way of her dollhouse, both memorializes her parents and helps her reclaim a sense of control during tumultuous times.
