This had me in tears by the end. Kate Fagan writes with incredible skill, layering personal narratives and more general, non-fictiony stuff (as with respect to the social psychology of social media such as Instagram. or the relentless culture of achievement in which so many young Americans operate), through the story of Maddy, who "had it all", everything but an intrinsic sense of self-worth.

One of the frustrating things about Ms. Fagan's two books (also [b:The Reappearing Act: Coming Out on a College Basketball Team Led By Born-Again Christians|18371443|The Reappearing Act Coming Out on a College Basketball Team Led By Born-Again Christians|Kate Fagan|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1400939101s/18371443.jpg|25981545]) is that the protagonists and those around them are unable to see / accept essential things about themselves, which Ms. Fagan narrates so wonderfully that the reader can see them clearly. This is not a writing flaw, it's the nature of these stories - Ms. Fagan is gay, Maddy suffered from what might tritely be called depression, it takes too long (more tragically in Maddy's case) for them and those around them to see and accept. I think the word "depression" only came up once in connection with Maddy, which surprised me. (It might have been more, but it wasn't much.) The parents and doctors and friends and others never seemed to really diagnose the problem. This is intentional, I think - Ms. Fagan urges against reduction of Maddy's problems to a single word, or syndrome, and so my own desire for that kind of simplicity reflects my own intellectual weakness, and a profoundly human desire for answers to [i]why[/i] shit happens, for narratives that make sense of the senseless. But, God, it's frustrating.

On the one hand, it seems like this didn't need to happen, that the pieces were there. As with Ms. Fagan's own situation, others just had a really hard time conceptualizing and accepting that what was best for the protagonist required them to abandon their own ideas, and really to listen to what these young women were trying to tell them.

The athletics angle here is essential, of course, and Fagan grapples beautifully with the challenges we face in dealing with mental illness in this context. Sports challenges us to be tough, strong, to discover and then push past our limitations. Yet, we have an easier time accepting physical limits - a blown knee is a blown knee. Mental limits cannot be directly observed, and are too easily treated as weaknesses to be pushed through. Anyway, Fagan does a much better job of grappling with all of this than I ever could, and if these issues --or the others I have touched on, including the social psychology of social media, the pressures we put on our children to succeed, and the nature of mental illness-- if these are of interest to you, or if you just want to read some beautifully deft writing that will hit you in the heart, I can't recommend this highly enough.