What Made Maddy Run: The Secret Struggles and Tragic Death of an All-American Teen

While Madison’s status as a student athlete came with unique pressures, Fagan contextualizes Madison’s issues within the larger pressures facing today’s teenagers. These pressures become intensified when students leave home and make the transition to college. She identifies a gap between Madison’s generation and their parents. Madison is part of a generation that pushes for perfection. Fagan contrasts Madison’s experience to Jim’s. When Jim was young, “good colleges were challenging to get into, but it wasn’t like it is today, when being a solid, diligent student is no longer enough” (45). Jim went to a school without the name recognition of an Ivy League, “but he had loved his time there. The best four years of his life. He still kept in touch with his college friends” (15). In contrast, we see Madison and her friends, who are so focused on excelling that they don’t have fun.

Students coming of age in the 2000s aimed for straight A's, high GPAs, strong extra-curriculars, second languages, and active volunteerism. Fagan subtly draws out the dangers of perfectionism for both athletes and non-athletes, painting a picture of a generation of young people who were never given the time to discover their passions, make mistakes, and waste time. She writes, “Scientists have also noted a correlation between the decreasing amount of childhood free play—any play not directed by adults—and the increasing rates of anxiety and depression among kids. As free play decreases, anxiety increases” (113). Many young people internalized this pressure to excel, especially as college admissions became more competitive. Fagan cites William Deresiewicz, who says that “we have created a generation of world-class hoop jumpers […]. We’re teaching young people what to think, but not how to think” (114).

College is mythologized as a period of self-discovery and freedom, where young people can figure out who they are without the pressures of adult life. For high-achieving students, however, college adds more pressure to excel. Throughout the book, Fagan describes Madison as a young woman whose own desires were been stunted by expectations. Fagan writes, “What if what she wanted and what she thought she was supposed to want were opposed? And what if this gap between head and heart happened again?” (61). Fagan writes that Madison couldn’t turn down the prestige of an Ivy League school, even though people around her thought that a liberal arts college would be a better fit. Despite her rapidly declining mental and emotional health, Madison was unable to articulate her own needs. While her thoughts centered on how she could change her life, the pressure she was under was just too much.

Madison is a digital native and comes of age in an era of social media and instant communication. Social media creates a highlights reel of people’s lives: vacations, graduations, parties, athletic meets. Scrolling through Instagram feeds, everyone seems happy and successful, encouraging constant comparison. Fagan identifies two significant ways that social media contributed to Madison’s mental health struggles. First, it encouraged superficial but constant communication that did not allow Madison to get the help she needed. Second, social media constructs an idealized version of life that makes people think others are happier than they are. Madison went to great lengths to preserve her public persona, hiding her true distress from family and friends.

Fagan quotes Madison’s text messages throughout the book. A shortcoming in writing about Madison’s life is that we don’t have access to Madison’s point of view. Fagan uses Madison’s text messages to introduce her voice into the story. In Chapter 5, Fagan writes that she is nervous to look at Madison’s texts because she assumes they will provide an intimate look her into her inner world. She is surprised that the messages are quite superficial. In the messages, Madison regularly says that she is unhappy. However, her messages are often punctuated with “LOL” or “hahaha” or “J.” When Madison tries to tell people how distressed she is, she struggles to articulate the depths of her pain. Friends and family surround Madison, but she is isolated and alone.

While constant communication gives an impression of closeness, Fagan quotes William Deresiewicz, who writes, “Instead of having one or two true friends that we can sit and talk to for three hours at a time, we have 968 ‘friends’ that we never actually talk to; instead we just bounce one-line messages off them a hundred times a day” (116). A constant refrain in the book is that no one understood how depressed Madison was. Her messages revealed that she tried to tell people. Still, there are a series of what Fagan calls “connection failures”—incidents in which her family and friends recognized that something was wrong but did not grasp the full scope of Madison’s distress.

In one instance, Madison collapses at the finish line after a challenging race. She is physically and emotionally depleted, but when her mother suggests a photograph, she immediately recovers, beaming for the camera and proudly posing by the racetrack. In this moment, Madison consciously projects an image of how she thinks she should look, rather than how she feels. Because Madison’s Instagram made her look happy, people did not understand how depressed she was. Fagan writes that Instagram often hides more than it shows us, saying “the more polished and put-together someone seems—everything lovely and beautiful and just as it should be—perhaps the more likely something vital is falling apart just offscreen” (94). Madison controlled her image so tightly that people did not really seem to notice how unhappy she was. The pressure to present a happy façade likely contributed to deeper feelings of depression.