Chapel Hill News -- October 15, 2005
For anyone who has ever lost a friend
LUCY TEITLER
LUCY TEITLER
Cameron, the protagonist of Leah Stewart's second novel, "The Myth of You and Me," is 6-foot-2. Stewart herself is a much more average 5-foot-4.
Also unlike Cameron, Stewart does not live in Oxford, Miss., Worcester, Mass., or out of the back of her car. She lives in rural Hillsborough.
When I first see her standing on her porch, errant raindrops falling from the roof creating a permeable wall between us, she seems no more familiar to me than she would be if I had not read her book.
"Especially when you work in the first person," she explains, holding her 11-month-old daughter, Eliza, in her arms, "it is difficult to make people understand that the narrator is not you. As my husband says, you don't have a window into my soul."
"This book isn't a window into your soul?" I ask, only partly ironically.
Perhaps because "The Myth of You and Me" deals with the very personal subject of the painful demise of a friendship between two women, part of me does want to believe every word of it is true, despite its label as fiction.
She laughs.
"Well," she admits, "a book is always a little bit of a window into an author's soul."
For all her differences with Cameron, Stewart does have some similarities as well. Like Cameron, her father was in the Air Force and she moved around as a child. She too went to high school in New Mexico. She too went to Vanderbilt.
And she too had a best friend, like Cameron's Sonia, with whom she had a traumatic breakup over a man. At least it seemed like it was over a man.
In the book, Cameron discovers that Sonia, her best friend through high school and college, has slept with her boyfriend, a man with whom she is moving to a new town, possibly to get married.
When she finds out, she leaves both her boyfriend and Sonia, a double loss that has led her to the reclusive life that she leads at the beginning of the novel.
In real life, Stewart did not find out that her own non-Sonia had slept with her college boyfriend until she had already split from him, which she says simplified things for her.
"My reaction was entirely about her having betrayed me," Stewart says. "Which I think is part of the reason why it lingered."
Losses of friendships can be as damaging as romantic losses. Still, people often feel the need to justify their lingering feelings.
"I struggled with whether it was worthy of being a topic," Stewart says. "At the time there were so few books where the primary relationship is a friendship."
Now, "The Myth of You and Me" seems to be part of a trend, headed perhaps by "The Friend Who Got Away," a collection of essays about broken friendships among women, edited by Jenny Offill and Elissa Schappell, with whom Stewart appeared on WUNC's "The State of Things" in September.
But there is still something fundamentally interior about the loss of a friend. After all, to whom do you confide your feelings if it's your confidante you have lost?
"There's no structure in our culture to analyze these kinds of break ups," Stewart says. "There are no sympathy cards for them. No one would count it as a good excuse for anything, except maybe skipping a cocktail party. And even then you'd probably be seen as immature or a drama queen. It's this intense thing that all these women go through and wonder, worrying if there's something weird about us."
Perhaps it is this pervasive insecurity that made me hope that Stewart was Cameron, that made her assertion that the book was not a window into her soul so strangely sad.
Stewart has seen her college best friend once since their last big fight, five years ago at the wedding of the man in question. They had lunch, each accompanied by her husband.
"It was interesting," Stewart says. "Pleasant."
When they saw each other, Stewart says, "I was looking at her thinking, 'do I still know you?' I think that's one of the main questions of my book: Do we still know each other if we don't know each other in the here and now?"
In the weeks after the book was released, had a special promotion allowing readers to send a free advance copy of "The Myth of You and Me" to a friend. There was even a box to check to send the book anonymously.
When it arrived at the home of the friend, lush and red, its spine contained a sentence instead of a title: "A novel for anyone who has ever lost or found a friend." Folded inside was a letter from the publisher.
"If you'd like to know who requested that we give you a copy of this book," it read, "just send an email to me."
But Stewart herself does not see this book as an attempt to reunite with her college friend.
"I don't want her to read the book," she says. "I wouldn't want it to seem like an act of revenge. I keep having to talk about her because people are curious. But I don't have any ill feeling toward her at all and I wouldn't want her to think I did."
I suggest to Stewart that the friend might have the opposite reaction, interpreting the book as an invitation for reconciliation.
"If she interpreted it that way," Stewart says skeptically, "that would be fine."
By this point, Stewart has put Eliza to bed and we are alone in the room. No one speaks for a moment and we hear the music on the stereo, a band that she identifies as The Rudds.
The male lead singer's voice sings, "I've never had a friend like you."
His heartache is so apropos that we smile at each other.
A few minutes before, Stewart has told me that in adapting the true aspects of her life into fiction, she "amps everything up."
I reflect on that comment now because The Rudds' lyrics are coming from an amp, but also because if their words had interrupted a similar conversation in Stewart's book, it would have seemed heavy-handed.
But my thoughts are interrupted by Stewart's.
"I'm not saying I'm unwilling to re-establish my old friendship," she says. "It just doesn't have the same urgency for me as it does for Cameron."
Perhaps that is the great privilege of a writer. Cameron drove from Mississippi to Massachusetts to find her old friend, sleeping in scary motels and her car along the way. Stewart did not have to leave her desk to resolve her lingering feelings.
"I went through my college things and read her old letters and short stories," Stewart says. "Writing the book was the equivalent of Cameron's journey for me."
Also unlike Cameron, Stewart does not live in Oxford, Miss., Worcester, Mass., or out of the back of her car. She lives in rural Hillsborough.
When I first see her standing on her porch, errant raindrops falling from the roof creating a permeable wall between us, she seems no more familiar to me than she would be if I had not read her book.
"Especially when you work in the first person," she explains, holding her 11-month-old daughter, Eliza, in her arms, "it is difficult to make people understand that the narrator is not you. As my husband says, you don't have a window into my soul."
"This book isn't a window into your soul?" I ask, only partly ironically.
Perhaps because "The Myth of You and Me" deals with the very personal subject of the painful demise of a friendship between two women, part of me does want to believe every word of it is true, despite its label as fiction.
She laughs.
"Well," she admits, "a book is always a little bit of a window into an author's soul."
For all her differences with Cameron, Stewart does have some similarities as well. Like Cameron, her father was in the Air Force and she moved around as a child. She too went to high school in New Mexico. She too went to Vanderbilt.
And she too had a best friend, like Cameron's Sonia, with whom she had a traumatic breakup over a man. At least it seemed like it was over a man.
In the book, Cameron discovers that Sonia, her best friend through high school and college, has slept with her boyfriend, a man with whom she is moving to a new town, possibly to get married.
When she finds out, she leaves both her boyfriend and Sonia, a double loss that has led her to the reclusive life that she leads at the beginning of the novel.
In real life, Stewart did not find out that her own non-Sonia had slept with her college boyfriend until she had already split from him, which she says simplified things for her.
"My reaction was entirely about her having betrayed me," Stewart says. "Which I think is part of the reason why it lingered."
Losses of friendships can be as damaging as romantic losses. Still, people often feel the need to justify their lingering feelings.
"I struggled with whether it was worthy of being a topic," Stewart says. "At the time there were so few books where the primary relationship is a friendship."
Now, "The Myth of You and Me" seems to be part of a trend, headed perhaps by "The Friend Who Got Away," a collection of essays about broken friendships among women, edited by Jenny Offill and Elissa Schappell, with whom Stewart appeared on WUNC's "The State of Things" in September.
But there is still something fundamentally interior about the loss of a friend. After all, to whom do you confide your feelings if it's your confidante you have lost?
"There's no structure in our culture to analyze these kinds of break ups," Stewart says. "There are no sympathy cards for them. No one would count it as a good excuse for anything, except maybe skipping a cocktail party. And even then you'd probably be seen as immature or a drama queen. It's this intense thing that all these women go through and wonder, worrying if there's something weird about us."
Perhaps it is this pervasive insecurity that made me hope that Stewart was Cameron, that made her assertion that the book was not a window into her soul so strangely sad.
Stewart has seen her college best friend once since their last big fight, five years ago at the wedding of the man in question. They had lunch, each accompanied by her husband.
"It was interesting," Stewart says. "Pleasant."
When they saw each other, Stewart says, "I was looking at her thinking, 'do I still know you?' I think that's one of the main questions of my book: Do we still know each other if we don't know each other in the here and now?"
In the weeks after the book was released, had a special promotion allowing readers to send a free advance copy of "The Myth of You and Me" to a friend. There was even a box to check to send the book anonymously.
When it arrived at the home of the friend, lush and red, its spine contained a sentence instead of a title: "A novel for anyone who has ever lost or found a friend." Folded inside was a letter from the publisher.
"If you'd like to know who requested that we give you a copy of this book," it read, "just send an email to me."
But Stewart herself does not see this book as an attempt to reunite with her college friend.
"I don't want her to read the book," she says. "I wouldn't want it to seem like an act of revenge. I keep having to talk about her because people are curious. But I don't have any ill feeling toward her at all and I wouldn't want her to think I did."
I suggest to Stewart that the friend might have the opposite reaction, interpreting the book as an invitation for reconciliation.
"If she interpreted it that way," Stewart says skeptically, "that would be fine."
By this point, Stewart has put Eliza to bed and we are alone in the room. No one speaks for a moment and we hear the music on the stereo, a band that she identifies as The Rudds.
The male lead singer's voice sings, "I've never had a friend like you."
His heartache is so apropos that we smile at each other.
A few minutes before, Stewart has told me that in adapting the true aspects of her life into fiction, she "amps everything up."
I reflect on that comment now because The Rudds' lyrics are coming from an amp, but also because if their words had interrupted a similar conversation in Stewart's book, it would have seemed heavy-handed.
But my thoughts are interrupted by Stewart's.
"I'm not saying I'm unwilling to re-establish my old friendship," she says. "It just doesn't have the same urgency for me as it does for Cameron."
Perhaps that is the great privilege of a writer. Cameron drove from Mississippi to Massachusetts to find her old friend, sleeping in scary motels and her car along the way. Stewart did not have to leave her desk to resolve her lingering feelings.
"I went through my college things and read her old letters and short stories," Stewart says. "Writing the book was the equivalent of Cameron's journey for me."
posted by Lucy at 3:18 PM
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