I’d wanted to read The Myth of You and Me since Susan recommended it, after reading it for her book club. So, when it was chosen as the selection for my book club this month, I was quite excited. I started reading it yesterday afternoon and stayed up into the wee hours of the night, unable to put it down until I finished it.

There were several things I loved about this book. First, the friendship between Cameron, who is telling the story, and Sonia, her estranged best friend, and the ways in which the author brings to light the bonds between women, how strong and yet how fragile those friendships can be.

I felt a particular connection to Cameron, for her distant and troublesome relationship with her father, her admission of never having been a daddy’s girl, never having been his princess or baby, and her mixture of longing and scorn for those daughters who did have that kind of bond with their fathers. It makes me wonder if there perhaps my experience is not as unusual as I thought. Her compulsion to never put down roots, to continually be on the move, also resonated with me:

“I felt the stirrings of a certain familiar excitement – the anticipation of departure. [...] With moving, I have always been partial to the in-between, the blurred highway outside the window, that suspended time when everything you were lies behind you like a molted skin, and everything you might become shimmers at the horizon. You might choose anything and make it happen, constrained by nothing but your own imagination, sure that not even gravity can hold you.“

And then later, commenting that “… it’s easy to believe you’ve left behind not just a place but everything you felt there, even grief.”

I also loved the disparate settings of rural North Carolina and the contrasting Massachusetts environment. Cameron’s observation about the New England coastline captures the essence of this difference in northern and southern sensibilities: “This was not one of the mild, welcoming southern beaches I was used to, but an imposing one, where you seemed more likely to drown than to dog-paddle.”

Cameron’s recounting of the destruction of her friendship with Sonia, the reconcilation of her past with not only her present but also her future, and the ways in which we deceive not only others, but ourselves, makes for a truly enjoyable reading experience. I can’t wait to hear what my fellow bookclubbers thought of it, and if it impacted any of them in a similar way.