I Am the Cheese

I Am the Cheese is a young adult novel by the American writer Robert Cormier, published in 1977.

The novel is built from three strands. One is Adam Farmer's bicycle journey from the fictional town of Monument, Massachusetts, based on Cormier's own home town of Leominster, to see his father in Rutterburg, Vermont, and it is told in the first person. The second is a set of transcripts from recorded sessions between a subject called A and a doctor, in which the patient's memory is being tested. The third is a flashback account of the family's past, including their time in a witness protection arrangement and the reason they had to change their names. Cormier withholds the connections between the strands until the end, so the reader is working out who Adam is at the same time as he is, and the book's structure is as much the point as the story it tells.

Cormier wrote several novels for teenagers about the abuse of institutional power, and this one is the most formally experimental of them.