The story opens in Summer, in the wake of Ingrid’s suicide, and follows Caitlin through the year - coming to terms with her best friend’s death, and navigating life without her. There’s an articulate, literary style to La Cour’s writing, without sacrificing the authenticity of her teen narrator’s voice. My response as a reader largely hinges on the manner in which it is presented – and when I perceive this to be at all gratuitous, it tends to make me punchy.īut Hold Still is not only a sensitive portrayal of grief, but a beautifully written story about healing and hope. I have shared my thoughts previously on the subject of grief in fiction, and I don’t hesitate to say that I find it an extremely polarising theme. And had this book set out to explain Ingrid’s death with a list of reasons it would have been doing not only Ingrid, but others who experience mental illness, a gross injustice, invalidating the fact that depression is a disease.įortunately, Hold Still approaches the topics of mental illness and suicide with respect and honesty.
It’s a deeply insightful expression of understanding, an extension of empathy, distilled into one potent line.
In context, it’s one of the most powerful statements in the entire novel. Out of context, it is an ambiguous, awkwardly phrased sentence that makes my fingers itch to shove in some punctuation. It was this simple line that made me realise that I not only liked, but respected this book. Ingrid giggled, and I tried to ignore the feeling that something good between us was changing.”You might be looking for reasons but there are no reasons.” I wanted to ask Ingrid if it hurt to do that to herself, but I felt stupid, like I must have been missing something, so what I said was, F*** you too, b****. They wore their long sleeves pulled down past their wrists and made slits for their thumbs so that the scars on their arms wouldn't show. I knew that a lot of girls at our school cut themselves.
The cuts were shallow, so the scabs only stood out a little bit. Instead, I reached my hand out and traced the words. Look, I would've said to the nurse at her little desk, eyeglasses perched on her pointed nose. I should have lifted Ingrid's shirt to show the cuts. I should have grabbed her arm and taken her straight to the nurse's office, into that small room with two cots covered in paper sheets and the sweet, stale medicinal smell. I stood quiet for a moment, feeling the breath get knocked out of me. She had scrawled F*** YOU on her stomach. She lifted up her shirt to show me after the cuts had scabbed over. “The first time she carved something into her skin, she used the sharp tip of an X-Acto knife.
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