Sharp Objects “Cherry”

So, I want to take a moment here to discuss my least favorite scene from the original novel.  It was dramatized in this episode.

At a point in the book, Amma finds Camille and somehow gets her much older half-sister to go to a party with her and her teenage friends.  Once there, Camille ends up taking drugs from Amma, and then the two…bond?  Sort of?  They both twirl around in front of their house, talk about how much they love being sisters and they’re soul mates or something.

This scene…really bothered me.

Now, I know Camille isn’t a paragon of virtue.  She’s a woman with a lot of mental and emotional problems.  We see her engage in a lot of behavior, mostly involving heavy drinking and the words she carves into her skin.  Author Gillian Flynn seems to enjoy writing about women with huge problems, the sorts of problems that aren’t going to lead to their making healthy decisions.

Now, as far as Camille goes, much of this story isn’t so much about the murder mystery, which moves at a fairly glacial pace anyway, as it does   We know Adora has been, in a very passive-aggressive way, a terrible mother.  We see her step-father Alan try to get Camille to stop doing her job in a less effective way than Adora has been since the series started.  We’ve seen most of the people in town talk trash about Camille, and there’s the part about the dead sister.  This episode does show at least one girl from Camille’s old high school class actually cares, but Richard is looking into Camille’s past, and that won’t end well for a whole lot of people.

Point is, as I was reading, I wanted to see Camille do better or at least hold steady.  Her inability to see Amma as the horrible girl she’s been so far is something of a problem.  And, for all I know Camille has problems, seeing a woman over thirty going to a high school party with her kid sister and behaving the way she did seemed to be a real low for the character.  And it really bothered me.

Point is, I see it here, and I know I’m in the home stretch, but if there’s one moment in the book that made me wish I could skip it, that didn’t add anything to the plot but instead showed one woman’s descent to a really low and pathetic point that I didn’t really want to read about.  Thankfully, the scene in the mini-series seems a lot shorter all things being equal.