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shalannaI kind of melted down today at the Peeps writers' critique meeting. I think I snapped at a couple of people, actually.
I didn't MEAN to. It was just that . . . the first two readers/critiquers kept saying that Camille was inconsistent, that if she's a prostitute (and nowhere in the book did I say or imply that she IS, but more about that later, because they came away with that impression and I'll have to make sure that other readers don't) she wouldn't be naive about other things. They said similar things last time when they read the first chapter.
I thought I had that stuff covered. I pointed out that I already said twice that she ran away from home to escape her stepfather, that she has been gone since her sixteenth birthday three weeks ago, that she spent the past couple of weeks in the company of one traveling salesman who seemed to be just lonely (but was actually a sorcerer--and thereby hangs a tale), that she left because he wasn't going far enough away fast enough . . . that I never said she was a prostitute, but that it should be obvious that when someone hooks up with you, that person is going to expect something from you in return. She's a lost and confused little soul who is having to cope with the reality of life on the streets. Other readers haven't brought this up, although some have said they don't feel sympathetic towards her.
Perhaps the character is a bit like me. A person may feel that she has to be someone she's not, put on an act, take on a persona in order to survive a situation until she can get somewhere else. A young person may take on several roles, trying them on to see what she's comfortable with. This is a time of experimentation. If you're put into a bad situation, you might act differently (and I say this in the opening of the book, that her life had changed and that she blames her stepfather because he gave her no choice but to run away--she didn't want to go into the foster care system, which I explain as well.) You might not be just the most consistent little robot in the world. In fact, I know that *I* am not very consistent. (It's what makes me so charming.)
Some of what they're objecting to is the sex--that she doesn't see it as a hugely intimate act. Well, partly that's because she was abused. Partly that's because nowadays, the kids *don't*, in general, consider it an act of bonding with the other person *every* time. Sometimes it's just a hookup. In Camille's case, she has to do it for convenience, so she can get food and shelter for the night--she pretends to like the guy, she gets to stay in the hotel room and travel with him. She isn't mature enough to figure out that he might also have an ulterior motive, but there's plenty of time for readers to figure out that he has one when they get to the chapters in his point of view. She sees him as a lonely traveling businessman, when in actuality there's a much darker side to him that he has hidden from her. She's still too trusting and has the way that sixteen-year-olds tend to have of trusting people and not seeing beneath and being properly suspicious. However, you can't come out and say this all in so many words. You have to imply it from characters' actions. I've tried to hint at this stuff and raise story questions instead.
But anyway, the sex attitudes (from what I can tell) and attitudes toward taking things are making the critique group say that she's acting like a hardened street hooker, and I don't agree. Okay, so I was a virgin when I married (and the two critique partners who were saying all this said that they were, as well--they're oldsters like me), but most people aren't nowadays (and possibly weren't ever.) I see this character as having had relationships, perhaps even having slept with her boyfriend Jerry and possibly had some hanky-panky with other guys (she's 16 now, after all). She's not Truella Pureheart. But then neither is she a hardened street hooker. I don't believe that I portray her as such (talking about her teddy bear in her backpack, the dog tags of her late dad's that she keeps, actually believing that her cousin in California really IS an actress--on the basis of that postcard she got--and that she'll help Camille get into show business when she gets there, etc.) But that's what they kept coming back to--that if my character does X or Y, that she must be a hardened street hooker. And that therefore she can't have any of the beliefs or behaviors that the young impressionable girl trying on the new life has. I don't agree.
When you're sixteen (and this character just turned sixteen), you have a different way of thinking. This is the proverbial "wise child" who is in some ways wise beyond her years, but in other ways is still a child who wasn't finished growing up. She was studying for the SAT and being an "A" student when this stepfather turned her world inside-out. Suddenly that stuff didn't matter. She's still precocious and highly verbal, but it doesn't mean she's fully formed. She wasn't ready to be out on her own, but she figures it's better than being THERE. Just because she has slept with her boyfriend and maybe messed around with a couple of other guys on dates doesn't mean she wants to be molested and raped by her stepfather, and running away seemed preferable to the family uproar and going off to live in a foster home that could be even worse.
She's inconsistent in human, consistent ways. She found a coin purse on the bus and kept it, thinking she'd find the owner through the library card that was inside and take it back, yet when she's locked into the supermarket's office and accused of stealing, she rifles the desk thinking idly of finding some cash. To her, taking money from The Man (especially when she's being accused) is not a sin, while keeping some poor fellow bus-rider's coins would be. (Although all sin is equal in the eyes of God, it isn't necessarily seen as so by lesser mortals, especially younger ones.) One person in my group cited that as making her inconsistent, but I don't see that.
Camille also doesn't see any problem with bribing that crooked police officer with a (now, how can I phrase this delicately) bl*wjob--in order to get him to let her go (instead of taking her downtown and booking her, which would mean her mother would get called and she'd get sent home to that bad situation.) The guy has let her know that he's crooked, and she's just naive enough to think that he'll play fair with her. I mean, she's used to hitching rides with truckers now and has compartmentalized this part of her life--she knows that the rules for riding are "grass, gas, or ass," and so to her, this is a way out that's acceptable. She's a bit grossed out, but hey, this is not even considered sex by most kids today (and not even by some Presidents.) Sure, *I* feel differently, but that's the author. This is the character.
She's still naive enough, however, that when he reneges on the deal and says he's taking her in anyway, she cries and argues. This (again) is the way I feel a sixteen-year-old would act. When you're that age, you are a grown-up one minute and a child the next. You are not fully mature, even if you have had to adopt the surface sheen of a hardened traveler so you can survive. And yes, she HAS had to. But she's still a marshmallow inside and has to cope. It's life in the school of hard knocks.
Let's face it. When you wake up the first morning after you have run away and spent the night on the street, you're changed. Either you run back home crying and decide to deal with whatever it was (if you can), or you struggle to your feet and say, "This is me now. I have to do whatever it takes to survive." That's what she has done. It doesn't make her a prostitute because she has traveled/hitched with guys and ended up staying a couple of nights with them, because that was how she could stay in a hotel room instead of on the street. It was only a couple of guys, one in particular who'll be a major player in the story. She considers them "tricks," but she thinks she's a lot more sophisticated than she is and has been picking up street talking and thinking because of being immersed in it. A bit of research on runaways reveals that many of them fall prey to the predators who are out there, and if it takes some scheming and maneuvering to stay off the street, I think your typical sneaky sixteen-year-old girl would do it (and maybe not even realize that she's getting into a bad situation). She'll adopt whatever stance she thinks a runaway should, according to what she's seen on television. That's where her experience comes from--it's all vicarious, and she THINKS she knows what will happen because of that.
Characters can't be as contradictory and multifaceted as real people; we know that. However, give me a break. What they're pointing at as being traits of a "hardened street hooker" (after I wrote, in the first couple of paragraphs of the book, that she'd left home about three weeks ago after her stepfather had molested her and she saw that her mother was taking HIS side) are just aspects of being an immature kid who has gone out and is trying to figure life out and make it on her own. She has her own reasons for believing as she does. She's a woman AND she's a child. This is the way you are at that age.
That doesn't make this a YA novel, in my opinion. YA novels are not as deep. They don't explore as deeply or extensively as a "grown-up" novel. Many new and new-ish YA novels that I've read (because people I know have written them) seem like a good first draft on which to build a full-fledged novel. (Paul Zindel's novels, written in the 1970s, didn't have that hollow feeling so much, although they were fluff YA in many ways. This is a new trend, IMHO.) Camille's story is more of a contemporary fantasy starring people of many different ages.
However . . . I suppose the truth is that I'm just overreacting, that I can't take criticism, that I'm a prima donna. Perhaps you're thinking exactly that, and you might be right. Perhaps it's just an emotional thing where I feel more and more hopeless as I look at the impossibility of ever writing something that the market will accept. After being at this for twenty years and having mastered (mostly) the form and developed my voice, I'm ready to get something right. Maybe it was just the pile-up of criticisms of the character all in a row that cracked the vessel. Possibly the vessel is already cracked.
I'm also on that VLCD (very low-calorie diet), a medically supervised fast with one "meal" (1-1/2 cups of salad or raw vegetables with 7 oz of chicken or 5 oz of beef) per day, and that can put a person on edge. At least it can if that person has been coping with stress by relying on food for twenty-odd years now. There's nowhere for stress to go now but inside. (Though it is getting better. I'm feeling the benefits of being able to breathe all the way to the bottom of my ribcage. I am going to show Dr. Bell that tomorrow by singing a chorus of "Last Night (I Didn't Get To Sleep At All)" while on the breathing test machine. I had a lot of water and some fat stores just where I needed that air to be.)
I don't know. Anyway, I should probably have apologized for being defensive. And/or for snapping back. But I didn't think of it at the time.*
[*Regular readers of this saga already know I am a bad person. No need to explain further.]
In this group during a critique, the members will say something, then stop and look at you to make sure you understand--and will sometimes ask if you know what they mean. They like to hear an acknowledgement because they took the time to think up this objection and bring it to your attention, which is fine. But at some point, when I'm hearing things I don't and can't agree with, it's better for me to be under the stricture of the Warren Norwood-style critique circles--the one that says, "When your work is being evaluated, you keep your damn mouth shut, smile and nod now and then if you must, write evil thoughts in shorthand in the dust on the end table, but DO NOT DEFEND and DO NOT RESPOND with anything except a 'Thank you' at the end." Warren was of the opinion (which I generally share) that you need to let most comments rest and percolate for a few days before you can really evaluate them objectively. Most of the time, though, the group works well when we allow people to respond and question further during the critiques. But today it probably would've been better to have a rule that I don't talk at all.
And then my favorite person in the group (I am teasing here, although he does get extra points because [1] he invited me to join, [2] he plays music by ear and writes songs that I like, and [3] he has a cool collection of hats and shaggy-dog stories) did *his* critique and said he really hadn't been bothered by any of that. **But** then he committed the Unpardonable Sin of saying he thinks I should change some of my semicolons to those funny dots that end sentences. As founder of the FidoNet Semicolon Protection Society, I got rankled. I try not to use 'em TOO often, but only when the two thoughts or ideas need to be closely connected in the reader's mind. When I was in my twenties, I would have given an impassioned defense, talking about how the semicolon is the fulcrum and the two sentences of equal weight are related and such crap . . . I probably would have done that well into my thirties. Now that I am ancient and the earth has finally cooled*, I'm too tired to go into all that--it's not going to change anyone's mind.
[* But does seem to be warming up again. Whew.]
My target audience, after all, is not "Every Possible Reader." I just can't do it that way. My audience is my audience, and if it turns out it's the null set, then so be it.* So it goes.** That's the way the fortune cookie crumbles.***
[* Harry, "Pump Up the Volume"]
[** Kurt Vonnegut, _Slaughterhouse-Five_]
[*** Grandma, upon hearing that the boy I had been flirting with for weeks in drama class had asked another girl to the dance]
****Don't spend all night surfing around that everything site if you click one of those links, OK? You have to go to work/school/the doctor/Paris in the morning.
I didn't MEAN to. It was just that . . . the first two readers/critiquers kept saying that Camille was inconsistent, that if she's a prostitute (and nowhere in the book did I say or imply that she IS, but more about that later, because they came away with that impression and I'll have to make sure that other readers don't) she wouldn't be naive about other things. They said similar things last time when they read the first chapter.
I thought I had that stuff covered. I pointed out that I already said twice that she ran away from home to escape her stepfather, that she has been gone since her sixteenth birthday three weeks ago, that she spent the past couple of weeks in the company of one traveling salesman who seemed to be just lonely (but was actually a sorcerer--and thereby hangs a tale), that she left because he wasn't going far enough away fast enough . . . that I never said she was a prostitute, but that it should be obvious that when someone hooks up with you, that person is going to expect something from you in return. She's a lost and confused little soul who is having to cope with the reality of life on the streets. Other readers haven't brought this up, although some have said they don't feel sympathetic towards her.
Perhaps the character is a bit like me. A person may feel that she has to be someone she's not, put on an act, take on a persona in order to survive a situation until she can get somewhere else. A young person may take on several roles, trying them on to see what she's comfortable with. This is a time of experimentation. If you're put into a bad situation, you might act differently (and I say this in the opening of the book, that her life had changed and that she blames her stepfather because he gave her no choice but to run away--she didn't want to go into the foster care system, which I explain as well.) You might not be just the most consistent little robot in the world. In fact, I know that *I* am not very consistent. (It's what makes me so charming.)
Some of what they're objecting to is the sex--that she doesn't see it as a hugely intimate act. Well, partly that's because she was abused. Partly that's because nowadays, the kids *don't*, in general, consider it an act of bonding with the other person *every* time. Sometimes it's just a hookup. In Camille's case, she has to do it for convenience, so she can get food and shelter for the night--she pretends to like the guy, she gets to stay in the hotel room and travel with him. She isn't mature enough to figure out that he might also have an ulterior motive, but there's plenty of time for readers to figure out that he has one when they get to the chapters in his point of view. She sees him as a lonely traveling businessman, when in actuality there's a much darker side to him that he has hidden from her. She's still too trusting and has the way that sixteen-year-olds tend to have of trusting people and not seeing beneath and being properly suspicious. However, you can't come out and say this all in so many words. You have to imply it from characters' actions. I've tried to hint at this stuff and raise story questions instead.
But anyway, the sex attitudes (from what I can tell) and attitudes toward taking things are making the critique group say that she's acting like a hardened street hooker, and I don't agree. Okay, so I was a virgin when I married (and the two critique partners who were saying all this said that they were, as well--they're oldsters like me), but most people aren't nowadays (and possibly weren't ever.) I see this character as having had relationships, perhaps even having slept with her boyfriend Jerry and possibly had some hanky-panky with other guys (she's 16 now, after all). She's not Truella Pureheart. But then neither is she a hardened street hooker. I don't believe that I portray her as such (talking about her teddy bear in her backpack, the dog tags of her late dad's that she keeps, actually believing that her cousin in California really IS an actress--on the basis of that postcard she got--and that she'll help Camille get into show business when she gets there, etc.) But that's what they kept coming back to--that if my character does X or Y, that she must be a hardened street hooker. And that therefore she can't have any of the beliefs or behaviors that the young impressionable girl trying on the new life has. I don't agree.
When you're sixteen (and this character just turned sixteen), you have a different way of thinking. This is the proverbial "wise child" who is in some ways wise beyond her years, but in other ways is still a child who wasn't finished growing up. She was studying for the SAT and being an "A" student when this stepfather turned her world inside-out. Suddenly that stuff didn't matter. She's still precocious and highly verbal, but it doesn't mean she's fully formed. She wasn't ready to be out on her own, but she figures it's better than being THERE. Just because she has slept with her boyfriend and maybe messed around with a couple of other guys on dates doesn't mean she wants to be molested and raped by her stepfather, and running away seemed preferable to the family uproar and going off to live in a foster home that could be even worse.
She's inconsistent in human, consistent ways. She found a coin purse on the bus and kept it, thinking she'd find the owner through the library card that was inside and take it back, yet when she's locked into the supermarket's office and accused of stealing, she rifles the desk thinking idly of finding some cash. To her, taking money from The Man (especially when she's being accused) is not a sin, while keeping some poor fellow bus-rider's coins would be. (Although all sin is equal in the eyes of God, it isn't necessarily seen as so by lesser mortals, especially younger ones.) One person in my group cited that as making her inconsistent, but I don't see that.
Camille also doesn't see any problem with bribing that crooked police officer with a (now, how can I phrase this delicately) bl*wjob--in order to get him to let her go (instead of taking her downtown and booking her, which would mean her mother would get called and she'd get sent home to that bad situation.) The guy has let her know that he's crooked, and she's just naive enough to think that he'll play fair with her. I mean, she's used to hitching rides with truckers now and has compartmentalized this part of her life--she knows that the rules for riding are "grass, gas, or ass," and so to her, this is a way out that's acceptable. She's a bit grossed out, but hey, this is not even considered sex by most kids today (and not even by some Presidents.) Sure, *I* feel differently, but that's the author. This is the character.
She's still naive enough, however, that when he reneges on the deal and says he's taking her in anyway, she cries and argues. This (again) is the way I feel a sixteen-year-old would act. When you're that age, you are a grown-up one minute and a child the next. You are not fully mature, even if you have had to adopt the surface sheen of a hardened traveler so you can survive. And yes, she HAS had to. But she's still a marshmallow inside and has to cope. It's life in the school of hard knocks.
Let's face it. When you wake up the first morning after you have run away and spent the night on the street, you're changed. Either you run back home crying and decide to deal with whatever it was (if you can), or you struggle to your feet and say, "This is me now. I have to do whatever it takes to survive." That's what she has done. It doesn't make her a prostitute because she has traveled/hitched with guys and ended up staying a couple of nights with them, because that was how she could stay in a hotel room instead of on the street. It was only a couple of guys, one in particular who'll be a major player in the story. She considers them "tricks," but she thinks she's a lot more sophisticated than she is and has been picking up street talking and thinking because of being immersed in it. A bit of research on runaways reveals that many of them fall prey to the predators who are out there, and if it takes some scheming and maneuvering to stay off the street, I think your typical sneaky sixteen-year-old girl would do it (and maybe not even realize that she's getting into a bad situation). She'll adopt whatever stance she thinks a runaway should, according to what she's seen on television. That's where her experience comes from--it's all vicarious, and she THINKS she knows what will happen because of that.
Characters can't be as contradictory and multifaceted as real people; we know that. However, give me a break. What they're pointing at as being traits of a "hardened street hooker" (after I wrote, in the first couple of paragraphs of the book, that she'd left home about three weeks ago after her stepfather had molested her and she saw that her mother was taking HIS side) are just aspects of being an immature kid who has gone out and is trying to figure life out and make it on her own. She has her own reasons for believing as she does. She's a woman AND she's a child. This is the way you are at that age.
That doesn't make this a YA novel, in my opinion. YA novels are not as deep. They don't explore as deeply or extensively as a "grown-up" novel. Many new and new-ish YA novels that I've read (because people I know have written them) seem like a good first draft on which to build a full-fledged novel. (Paul Zindel's novels, written in the 1970s, didn't have that hollow feeling so much, although they were fluff YA in many ways. This is a new trend, IMHO.) Camille's story is more of a contemporary fantasy starring people of many different ages.
However . . . I suppose the truth is that I'm just overreacting, that I can't take criticism, that I'm a prima donna. Perhaps you're thinking exactly that, and you might be right. Perhaps it's just an emotional thing where I feel more and more hopeless as I look at the impossibility of ever writing something that the market will accept. After being at this for twenty years and having mastered (mostly) the form and developed my voice, I'm ready to get something right. Maybe it was just the pile-up of criticisms of the character all in a row that cracked the vessel. Possibly the vessel is already cracked.
I'm also on that VLCD (very low-calorie diet), a medically supervised fast with one "meal" (1-1/2 cups of salad or raw vegetables with 7 oz of chicken or 5 oz of beef) per day, and that can put a person on edge. At least it can if that person has been coping with stress by relying on food for twenty-odd years now. There's nowhere for stress to go now but inside. (Though it is getting better. I'm feeling the benefits of being able to breathe all the way to the bottom of my ribcage. I am going to show Dr. Bell that tomorrow by singing a chorus of "Last Night (I Didn't Get To Sleep At All)" while on the breathing test machine. I had a lot of water and some fat stores just where I needed that air to be.)
I don't know. Anyway, I should probably have apologized for being defensive. And/or for snapping back. But I didn't think of it at the time.*
[*Regular readers of this saga already know I am a bad person. No need to explain further.]
In this group during a critique, the members will say something, then stop and look at you to make sure you understand--and will sometimes ask if you know what they mean. They like to hear an acknowledgement because they took the time to think up this objection and bring it to your attention, which is fine. But at some point, when I'm hearing things I don't and can't agree with, it's better for me to be under the stricture of the Warren Norwood-style critique circles--the one that says, "When your work is being evaluated, you keep your damn mouth shut, smile and nod now and then if you must, write evil thoughts in shorthand in the dust on the end table, but DO NOT DEFEND and DO NOT RESPOND with anything except a 'Thank you' at the end." Warren was of the opinion (which I generally share) that you need to let most comments rest and percolate for a few days before you can really evaluate them objectively. Most of the time, though, the group works well when we allow people to respond and question further during the critiques. But today it probably would've been better to have a rule that I don't talk at all.
And then my favorite person in the group (I am teasing here, although he does get extra points because [1] he invited me to join, [2] he plays music by ear and writes songs that I like, and [3] he has a cool collection of hats and shaggy-dog stories) did *his* critique and said he really hadn't been bothered by any of that. **But** then he committed the Unpardonable Sin of saying he thinks I should change some of my semicolons to those funny dots that end sentences. As founder of the FidoNet Semicolon Protection Society, I got rankled. I try not to use 'em TOO often, but only when the two thoughts or ideas need to be closely connected in the reader's mind. When I was in my twenties, I would have given an impassioned defense, talking about how the semicolon is the fulcrum and the two sentences of equal weight are related and such crap . . . I probably would have done that well into my thirties. Now that I am ancient and the earth has finally cooled*, I'm too tired to go into all that--it's not going to change anyone's mind.
[* But does seem to be warming up again. Whew.]
My target audience, after all, is not "Every Possible Reader." I just can't do it that way. My audience is my audience, and if it turns out it's the null set, then so be it.* So it goes.** That's the way the fortune cookie crumbles.***
[* Harry, "Pump Up the Volume"]
[** Kurt Vonnegut, _Slaughterhouse-Five_]
[*** Grandma, upon hearing that the boy I had been flirting with for weeks in drama class had asked another girl to the dance]
****Don't spend all night surfing around that everything site if you click one of those links, OK? You have to go to work/school/the doctor/Paris in the morning.
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Prostitutes, et al
Date: 2006-08-03 02:47 am (UTC)Camille is a confused kid who, as you point out, is relying on pseudo-knowledge, mostly gained from TV programs that only tell half the story at best. Her most notable trait, as I see it, is naïveté, which is not synonymous with cuteness or innocent charm.
I would recommend that those who are so sure of how much they know about prostitutes spend a few evenings on the nearest street where that time-honored craft is practiced.
You know those women you sometimes see who look 60 and claim to be 35 (and can prove that they are)? That's what being a "hardened street hooker" does to you. Camille . . . one very short step away from the pregnant teen who goes to stay with an aunt or cousin for a few months and comes back with a baby, much to everyone's feigned surprise.
And once again (What is this? The 450th time since 1988?), what have these sure-of-themselves critiquers had published lately?
no subject
Date: 2006-08-03 11:24 am (UTC)Okay, I know I have in the past suggested that maybe possibly there's a slight chance that you are sometimes once in a while occasionally not open enough to critique and revision...
This isn't one of those times. Based on your description I totally agree with your position: the character is not a forty-year-old hooker, she's a teenage runaway, and therefore she's going to act more like a kid than not.
Your critiquers may have a point about some other things, but in this case they're just not the right readers for this character. Sometimes a reader hits something they simply can't get past, and in my opinion this prevents them from effectively critiquing a book because they're not objecting to execution, it's the fundamental story or character they can't understand, and that isn't your problem. (I expect I'd have a similar problem with the thing I'm working on now--the first time my main character fires up a joint he's going to lose some readers. Oh, well.)
Now, there still could be problems in execution--I think there have been a few occasions here where you posted something and a reader just didn't like the character who was meant to be sympathetic. That happens to all of us and often means you haven't quite gotten the person out of your head and onto the page. But this case sounds different.
Bottom line: it's always a good idea to at least consider a critique. (And maybe the underlying issue here is the vulnerability isn't coming out so the character feels older and more hardened than she is or something--possible.) But you certainly don't have to accept every one, because sometimes the critiquer isn't ttrying to help you refine your story, they're trying to rewrite it. And other times they simply don't get it or are unable to relate to it. As the author, you have to figur out if that's the case and react accordingly.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-03 01:10 pm (UTC)I've spent the last 20+ years of my life working for the welfare system--mostly processing disability claims, which means hearing a lot of sad stories, and reading a lot of psychological evaluations of people with messed-up lives. Based on what you've told us here, in this post alone, the backstory you've shared for Camille isn't unusual or unrealistic. I can't speak for how well you've handled it in the story, but your basic premises are all to likely and all to real. If you have readers who can't get it, that's (more likely than not) the result of their own limitations rather than the unlikeliness of the character you're trying to portray.
Questions to consider: Why do youngsters run away from home? What happens to them when they do? What are the steps that lie between an unhappy teenager with a suboptimal home life and a used-up whore of 35? How do poor people feel about people who are well-off and seem (to them, anyway) to have no troubles? Why would you expect a poor girl to feel respect for a business, especially when the man running it accuses her of being a thief? The readers should be asking themselves these questions--you can confront your reading group head-on and tell them to ask them, but the outside reader has to be led to do so through other means.
Maybe references to "how things are in the movies/on TV" in Camille's thinking will help convey more of her worldview--maybe (to be classist and politicize things a bit) references in her thinking to how people in positions of power are always ready to take advantage of people without power, and so you have to look after yourself as best you can would help--like I say, I'm not sure what you've done along these lines already, but maybe more signposts to both her naivete and her resentments would help, in addition to word choices that play up how vulnerable she is.
One thing that I've noticed, via work, is that women and girls who've been sexually abused at a young age devalue themselves a lot--and tend to feel that sex is what gives them value--it has been made plain to them that it's a commodity, perhaps the only thing they have that anyone wants. It then becomes very easy to conclude that they might as well use it to their own advantage, since other people are perfectly willing to use them. Without looking at what you've written (I'd offer, but given what's on my plate in life just now, I'd never get it done, which is no help at all), my suggestion is to look at how well you've flagged the points you want to make about her.
Then again, you are probably going to need to find some younger and more worldly readers to really appreciate Camille--middle-aged women who've had safe and secure lives are likely to be extremely judgmental about women and girls like Camille--whether in real life or fiction, because they have no experience or knowledge of what events shape and produce Camilles--and are sure that if she's bad, it's because she's CHOSEN to be bad.