We read to see ourselves reflected. Cameron’s new book has a great title and two lovely and perfect epigrams that I must quote. The first is Ovid: “Be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you.”

And Denton Welch (journal, 8 May 1944, 11:15 pm): “When you long with all your heart for someone to love you, a madness grows there that shakes all sense from the trees and the water and the earth. And nothing lives for you, except the long deep bitter want. And this is what everyone feels from birth to death.”

And I’d like to brand those on my teenage self. Teens and those who never got over being teens need oils, talismans, quotations—above all, these fragments of literature that tell us “you’re not alone, you’re not crazy, it’s not your fault.” Reading books for or about young people as an adult is a displacing experience. We may wish certain books and characters had been available to us as teens or we may find a heady succor today in being transported to the adolescent past.

Our protagonist, eighteen-year old James Sveck, is infinitely quotatable and somewhat misanthropic, lonely, and sad. Not to mention nostalgic for another time— for Manhattan’s old Penn Station, for Trollope, Eric Rohmer, and Denton Welch. This is a potent nostalgia, a backward ache for a time that is not his own. The book’s references to the present—the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, 9/11—are jarring because James doesn’t comfortably live in the present. He doesn’t belong to his own time or the romanticized past.

Cameron has masterfully created a character who should be unsympathetic—a poor little rich white boy. But James is a supersensitive weirdo, oddball, iconoclast, combination of old man and child who has learned as a teenager, “You cannot always do and go what and where you please.” He is dealing with discoveries of his sexuality and his trauma. He is happily reminiscent though not derivative of Heide and Gorey’s alienated and unloved Treetorn and Melinda from Speak and the book evokes From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and The Squid and the Whale.

James’ experience at the American Classroom was so terrible and specific. I was reminded of my high school marching band horrors— feeling both superior and inferior to people your own age in a group who are having fun in literal lockstep. Dinners and dances are intended as gifts but are unbearable and solitary. Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You will be loved intensely—most likely by adults who remember. The book is also significant for the subtle non-didactic depiction of a gay teenager.

“I think that’s what scares me: the randomness of everything. That the people who could be important to you might just pass you by. Or you pass them by. How do you know…I felt that by walking away I was abandoning [them], that I spent my entire life, day after day, abandoning people.”