Notes from Kate Fagan's Sept. 21 talk at UMass

    Kate Fagan, signing copies of her book "What Made Maddy Run."

Some notes from Kate Fagan's talk:

Ask questions! When she was a beat reporter for the Philadelphia 76ers, they would have press conferences and she never asked asked questions.

Rather than show the video about Madison Holleran, which Fagan now has criticisms of,  she summed up the story it tells about Holleran a star athlete who took her own life. The headlines were along the lines of "Star Athlete Jumps to Death Over Grades," but Fagan feels there were other angles that were not fully explored, including the transition from high school to college and the conflict over quitting.

Fagan  said she wanted to convey three points, especially, during her talk: 1) The transition to college can be difficult  "It's like going to camp for the first time," she said. To a freshman, it can look like everybody else is doing much better than you are. At UPenn, where Holleran went to college, students speak of "Penn face," a kind of poker face that suggests to other people that "It's all coming easy." 

Looking at other people's carefully selected Instagram and Facebook photos can exacerbate this feeling that other people are doing much better. "I still feel left out when I look at Instagram," Fagan said.

2) Holleran's text messages did not provide much insight, because Holleran apparently deliberately tried to undercut any messages that she was struggling with emoji that seemed to say "re-interpret this message." Fagan had saved the text messages to last when she was looking at Holleran's computer, which Holleran's parents had allowed her to have access to for a weekend. But, "what struck" me, Fagan said, "was the lack of insight" she got from the messages. "The lack of insight was insightful."

3) We don't know how to talk about mental health in this country. The person who wakes up generally happy is lucky, but "In this country there's an attitude that some people struggle with mental health and some people are great." This isn't the case, Fagan said. Most people will probably have a mental health struggle sometime in his/her life. 

College can be more like climbing a tree than a ladder,  if you're not sure of the direction you want to go. This can be confusing, and if a student has an issue with anxiety or depression, as Holleran did, it can trigger a struggle.  "It's been pretty eye-opening how lucky I am that when I first wake up I'm pretty happy," Fagan said. 

Other points:

Quitting: Holleran was talked out of quitting the track team, and at the heart of her letter about wanting to quit, "was clearly the idea that she would would be a failure" if she did. Fagan said.

Fagan had wanted to quit playing basketball when she was in college but was similarly talked out of it. What ultimately helped Fagan, she said, was to tell her coach that she did not like the style of coaching that made Fagan the focus of criticisms aimed at the team, in general. Fagan explained to the coach that she responded best to praise and liked to be the "unsung hero."

Perfectionism: Fagan cited a quote "Notice how close perfection ia to despair." "That resonates with me," Fagan said. 

The hardest part about writing the book: "I never met Madison Holleran and and trying to feel authoritative about someone you built as a hologram -- I don't know if I'm right." How can Fagan ever really know what went on in Holleran's mind? While writing the book, Fagan had a recurring dream that she would see Holleran at a coffee shop, but when Fagan tried to approach her, she would disappear out a back door. 

There are rules about writing about suicide and once Fagan found out what they were she didn't like them. (There's a chapter in her book about them.) 

Now, Fagan wishes she had written more about the tension when talking about suicide between A) speaking of it as thought it is either predetermined that a person who wants to commit suicide will, and B) finding that someone is to blame or that "someone missed something."

Fagan writes about some of the same themes in he this piece on ESPN.com at http://www.espn.com/espnw/voices/article/19859160/honoring-life-penn-student-athlete-madison-holleran-continuing-talk-maddy