Coming of Age

I like writing, but I like a lot of things. Maybe out of those things, I’m best at writing. Maybe it’s where I’ve always felt most at home. Or maybe the writing part of me is over. Maybe there’s something else I’m supposed to do instead. I don’t know.

Violet’s tendency to second-guess herself in the wake of her sister’s death is on full display in Chapter 20 when she is with Finch at the Purina Tower. Her ability to give voice to these thoughts shows that she has begun to come of age, and she begins with a simple observation and then expands upon it. The fact that she then refutes it in the same breath shows that she still has work to do as she weighs her past against her future, and wonders what it all means.

This existential outlook is new for Violet, who has been going with the flow since her sister’s death. Her ease with herself grows along with her attraction to Finch, and for the first time in a while she ponders life’s questions as well as her own life. For her, a romantic awakening spurs emotional maturity.

You don’t know how it is. It’s like I’ve got this angry little person inside me, and I can feel him trying to get out. He’s running out of room because he’s growing bigger and bigger, and so he starts rising up, into my lungs, chest, throat, and I just push him back down. I don’t want him to come out. I can’t let him out.

In Chapter 22, Violet finally acknowledges her incredible anger, and the fear that she suffers at the thought of unleashing it. Violet is more accustomed to passive resistance, and she has long denied this aspect of herself which looms so large inside of her. When she finally gives it a voice and Finch gives her one rock after another to smash against the wall, it allows her to express physically what she cannot express verbally.

After she unleashes her rage, Finch kisses her for the first time and Violet sublimates her fury into passion. She has been waiting for this moment for some time and responds with ardor. As she matures, she learns to harness both her anger and her passion and direct these strong emotions where she wants them to go rather than let them control her.

It seemed to us that his sadness was that of a boy, the voluptuous heedless melancholy of a boy who has still not come down to earth, and moves in the arid, solitary world of dreams.

In Chapter 59, Violet thinks of Cesare Pavese, the Italian poet whom Finch often referred to and quoted. After Pavese committed suicide in 1950, a peer wrote these words about him. Violet imagines these words referring to Finch. Violet has moved through her grief and sees Finch, not unkindly, as the otherworldly boy that he always was. In taking his life, he remains that boy forever. Violet looks back as she herself stands on the cusp of adulthood and thinks of all the places she has yet to wander.

The Struggle to Survive

I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am rooted, but I flow. All gold, flowing …

Finch shares this quote from Virginia Woolf with Violet via Facebook in Chapter 8. He begins the exchange with a different passage that he does not accredit to Woolf and is both shocked and aroused when she responds with a Woolf quote of her own. After the conversation ends, he marvels that she is the first girl who speaks his language and flushes his stash of sleeping pills down the toilet.

Woolf, who attempted suicide many times before succeeding, is one of several authors that the two quote throughout the book, but it is this quote that best captures the pair’s shared and simultaneous feelings of joy and agony. They struggle to stay in the world even as they run from it. In Chapter 59, after Finch’s death, Violet reflects on these words while she treads water in Blue Hole. She finds a sense of peace and possibility in her own life. She has survived and is moving forward.

I’ve been in here before. Eventually, it works. I’ll wake up one morning and feel like coming out.

In Chapter 45, Finch confides in Violet about his “black, sinking” moods and she realizes that he has been living in his closet since his expulsion from school. Even as he reassures her that he will eventually leave his fort, she notes his hollow smile. His main concern is that she keeps his secret.

When she gets home, Violet holes up in her own closet and imagines what it would be like to live in it. She is content in Finch’s closet with him but can only stand to be alone in hers for a short while. She cannot imagine the suffering that would compel her to stay inside her closet and learns that her will to survive is stronger than she thought it was.

Do you know I’d give anything to be you for a day? I’d just live and live and never worry and be grateful for what I have.

In Chapter 48, Violet tells Finch that Amanda told her about the sleeping pills he took. As they argue about who has the harder burden to carry, it becomes clear that Finch perceives his struggle as more onerous than hers, perhaps even more onerous than anyone else’s. He knows that Violet has suffered but sees her sister’s death as one tragic glitch in an otherwise good life.

Finch sees himself as a casualty of his toxic family dynamic and of his own chemical makeup. His intelligence recognizes that he is more than a compilation of symptoms, but his illness does not allow him to recognize that his symptoms are treatable. In refusing to treat them, he gives up his struggle to survive.

The Support of Family and Community

And then one day we came home and he was lying on the patio, and he’d flown into the door one too many times, and you called his grave a mud nest and said, ‘None of this would have happened if you’d let him come in.’

In Chapter 25, Finch remembers a conversation with his mother about the cardinal that died. She is speaking to him and recalling his reaction to its death, a reaction that she believed to be over-the-top. Finch no longer shares his emotions with his mother because he feels that she will write them off or, as in this case, continue to bring them up. In marveling at her son’s emotional responses rather than empathizing with or asking deeper questions about them, she fails to nurture him. 

Finch wanted to nurture the bird in a way that his mother did not nurture him. Calling the bird’s grave a “mud nest” makes it sound cozy and peaceful, like the small spaces that Finch creates for himself. Finch is not only aware of his mother’s inability to nurture, but he also lets her know that he blames her for the outcome.

He came back, but when he left for good, he made it clear it was our fault. Our fault he came back, our fault he had to leave. He just couldn’t have a family.

When Finch shares these thoughts with Violet in Chapter 32, it highlights the many disparities between his and Violet’s families and how little support his has provided for him. Just as Finch tells his mother that the cardinal’s death is her fault, his father tells his whole family that it is their fault that he is leaving, and every ounce of his family’s attention is devoted to maintaining the fragile balance they achieve after he leaves. They are beginning to grow more comfortable with one another and their new family dynamic.

After Finch observes that his father couldn’t have a family, Violet asks about the new family that his dad does in fact have. For Finch, this new, blameless family is proof that maybe it was their fault after all.

‘Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.’ Pearl S. Buck. Maybe a germ is enough. Maybe it’s all you need.

When Violet’s mother quotes author Pearl Buck in Chapter 33, it illustrates just how much she and Violet are alike, and how different she is from Finch’s mother. Where Finch’s mother is quick to throw up her hands when things become intense, Violet’s mother presses through the discomfort in order nurture her child. She brainstorms with Violet rather than telling her what she should do, and then backs off and lets Violet run with the germ of an idea. Bit by bit, she is preparing her baby bird to leave the nest.