Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

By Peter Cameron,

Book cover of Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

Book description

Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is the story of James Sveck, a sophisticated, vulnerable young man with a deep appreciation for the world and no idea how to live in it. James is eighteen, the child of divorced parents living in Manhattan. Articulate, sensitive, and cynical, he…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

On the surface, this is a coming-of-age story with a protagonist similar to many others in the genre—bright, witty, snobbish, and pissed off at almost everybody he meets. But what makes this book so good is the narrator’s intelligence and self-awareness, and the complexity of all the characters and their relationships. 

My own upbringing was a far cry from the wealthy, highly-cultured world depicted here—I grew up in a tiny town in southern Iowa, and though there was a college in town I had little access to culture—yet I could completely relate to the gay narrator’s fish-out-of-water feeling and his…

This book tells the dead-on truth about what it feels like to be a kid who can’t find a single place in the world where he feels like he belongs. I love, love, love James Sveck’s smart, funny, cynical voice and how it made me laugh and cry—sometimes simultaneously. I love how this book shows that even young people with every advantage can be lonely, unhappy, and unseen, too, and that, like everyone else, they have to make themselves vulnerable to change that is going to be painful. But that sounds so—ugh, what adults are always saying to kids. The…

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