52 pages • 1-hour read
A Photo Finish
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Themes
Therapeutic Relationships With Animals
After witnessing his father die during a horseback racing accident, Cole experiences considerable anxiety about the danger of the sport. While he spends many years avoiding horses and racing, first by enlisting in the military and then working by in his family’s mining operation, upon his return to Gold Rush Ranch he’s unable to entirely stay away from horses. He ultimately learns—even before his relationship with Violet develops—that he doesn’t really want to live a life totally separate from horse racing, since his memories of his father inextricably link to it. Only when Cole begins to develop a relationship with Pipsqueak, however, does he acknowledge that he wants to spend more time around horses—not merely because of his memories but because he finds Pipsqueak’s presence therapeutic in itself.
Finding a relationship with Pipsqueak helpful doesn’t mean that Cole immediately finds her presence comfortable. Initially, he resists her strongly. He nearly refuses to allow Billie to leave her at the paddock adjacent to the farmhouse due to his fear, relenting only because he sees Violet’s excitement over caring for the horse. He tries to avoid Pipsqueak, but her relentless affection for him wears him down. This resistance to the difficult emotions that Pipsqueak inspires parallels Cole’s experiences in therapy; like with Trixie, his therapist, he finds Pipsqueak’s refusal to let him push her away an effective strategy for breaking down his emotional walls. Eventually, he begins to actively care for Pipsqueak, which he finds frightening but beneficial. When he embraces his relationship with the horse, it soothes him. He reflects:
[Pipsqueak is] the first horse I’ve touched since my dad died. I’ve barely allowed myself to admit this, but it feels good. Therapeutic maybe. The soft prickle of her coat under my fingers…I wonder if I’m having the same tactile experience my dad might have had while he was alive. If I’m feeling the same thing as he did once. Her excited whinny every time I pull up to the house almost makes me smile, and the way she followed me around quietly while I worked out her made me feel…I don’t know. Worthy of attention (180).
Pipsqueak’s love makes Cole feel close to his father, particularly because it reminds him of affection that he doesn’t feel he needs to “earn,” such as the unconditional love that a parent is meant to offer to a child. Because much of Cole’s anxiety about relationships stems from his fear that—due to his mental illness and physical disability—he no longer “deserves” love, Pipsqueak’s unquestioning adoration highlights the idea that love isn’t something that is “deserved” or earned, which helps Cole learn how to accept love and affection more easily. The novel highlights that animals’ ability to care for humans in a simple manner that transcends human concerns can prove a valuable therapeutic tool, particularly for people who have worries about their worthiness.
The Complexities of Grief
Both Violet and Cole have experienced losing a parent. For Violet, this loss occurred the day she was born, when her mother died in childbirth. For Cole, his father’s death when Cole was a teen is a visceral memory that haunts him every time he visits the racetrack. Though Cole and Violet share this type of loss, they experience their grief differently. The novel thus shows that grief is a complex and enduring emotion that can arise in unexpected ways.
Cole confronts his grief regularly after returning to Gold Rush Ranch, which is particularly hard for him because he spent more than a decade trying to avoid reminders of his father’s death by joining the military and working in the family’s mine. In some ways, Cole finds his father’s death more horrifying than anything he witnessed while at war: He notes that while military forces always went back into danger to retrieve injured or killed comrades, when his father fell during a race, his competitors continued to race without returning for Cole’s fallen father. While being back at the horse racing track forces him to confront the painful memory of his father’s death, he discovers that he doesn’t really wish to entirely avoid these memories, since horse racing makes him feel closer to his father. He learns that overcoming his instinctive desire to avoid any memory of his father’s death isn’t the same as healing and has potentially prolonged some of the more painful aspects of his grief.
Violet’s experience with grief is subtler than Cole’s, but that doesn’t mean she’s unaffected by it. Because her mother died when she was born, she doesn’t have any memories of the parent she lost. Violet recognizes, however, that grief impacted how her brothers and father treated her all her life: Because she was the youngest member of the family, the only girl, and the baby who represented their loss, the men in her family coddled her, which Violet despised. The effect of the loss on her family was the impetus for her choice to begin working at Gold Rush Ranch, where no one goes easy on her because of the circumstances of her birth. Like Cole, Violet learns how to live with grief in more nuanced way than stubbornly resisting it; instead of refusing all help because she was overprotected, Violet must learn that she can accept Cole’s aid because it offers them both comfort, not because he sees her as weak. Finding this middle ground helps her find a greater sense of peace, indicating how she and Cole can help each other heal from their losses.
The Merit of Progress Over Perfection in Mental Healthcare
In the flashback timeline, Cole refuses to ever show Violet a picture of himself because he fears that he’s undeserving of a romantic connection, an anxiety stemming from both his struggle to accept his amputation and PTSD following the loss of his father and his experiences at war. The main narrative timeline shows how he’s actively improving his mental health, largely through consistent therapy with Trixie, his no-nonsense therapist. Despite this progress, which Cole recognizes has been hard-won, he still feels himself unworthy of a romantic connection with the bright, cheerful Violet, as he doesn’t think he’s “healed.”
Cole’s confidence in himself in the main narrative timeline is significantly stronger than his self-perception in the flashback timeline. Rather than making him feel more equipped for romance, however, this improvement in his mental health makes him fear that he has even more to lose by pursuing a relationship with Violet. In addition to worrying that he’ll hurt her, he frets that he’ll be hurt himself, especially if he must watch her compete as a jockey, which brings back memories of his father’s death at the same racetrack. When Violet falls from Pipsqueak’s back, Cole panics even though she’s ultimately uninjured. He considers himself unable to handle the constant stress of Violet’s career due to the extreme fright he feels when she takes a minor fall. She’s unwilling to give up her career for her romance; though Cole doesn’t explicitly ask her to do this, his implication that she must choose between him and her job upsets her.
Though Violet and Cole break up temporarily, Violet clarifies that she isn’t “giving up” on him. This distinction is important because it allows Violet to argue that she cares for Cole as he is; she isn’t in love with an imagined version of him that is “better” or more “healed” than the current version of him. She explains that he doesn’t need him to be perfect in order to have a successful and happy relationship with her; he merely must be open to accepting her love, even as he continues to struggle with his mental health. The novel emphasizes that Violet’s love doesn’t “fix” Cole: He continues to face emotional issues into the Epilogue but actively confronts them and continues to work with Trixie. Nevertheless, he’s happy. Thus, the novel argues that those who struggle with mental health still deserve happiness, but that doesn’t mean that their struggles vanish. Instead, the text frames progress as more important than seeking perfection—a goal, the novel tacitly argues, that is impossible to achieve.
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