Hold Still

Hold Still is a wild ride of a memoir. Visceral and visionary. Fiercely beautiful. My kind of true adventure

Patti Smith

This book is riveting, ravishing – diving deep into family history to find the origins of art. I couldn’t take my eyes off of it

Ann Patchett

Read this book. If you want to be an artist, carry it around like your Bible

Bookreporter

One would not need to know Sally Mann's remarkable work as a photographer to be swept up in her memoir Hold Still, which draws upon a family history so rife with jaw-dropping drama that it could provide the grist for a dozen novels. With prodigious intellect and a telling instinct for the exact detail that will reveal character or throw it into question, Mann delves into the treacherous territory of memory, mesmerized by the relentless dance of beauty and decay. In doing so, she manifests in prose the acuity of seeing that has propelled her to the top rank of contemporary artists

Andrew Solomon, author of Far From the Tree and The Noonday Demon

Photographer Sally Mann's book Hold Still is one of the great portraits of the American South. Written in her pitch perfect prose style, it is a textbook of illumination and desire for anyone who hears the siren call of art beckoning to them. It's southern to the bone, hell on wheels. Hold Still is a masterpiece

Pat Conroy, author of The Death of Santini and South of Broad

For three decades Sally Mann has captured images that are unique, haunting, beautiful, disturbing, stark - it would take a mid-sized thesaurus to hold all the adjectives that have been used to describe both the art and the artist. In Hold Still, she wraps her prose around her pictures, revealing a fine talent for writing and a rich family history

John Grisham, author of The Firm and Sycamore Row

Sally Mann's Hold Still is just like her pictures: forthright, adventurous, loving, fearless, beautiful, intimate, and somehow uncanny. That means it's probably just like her

Lucy Sante, author of Low Life and Kill All Your Darlings

What I admire most about Sally Mann's new book is not her ability to write captivating sentences--she does. It's the honesty and fearlessness, the two mixed together, compelling her to own up to her mistakes, to acknowledge her winnings, to accept her losses (and those of her family). For this quality alone, Hold Still deserves a fixed place in the library of American memoir

Paul Hendrickson, author of Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost

There has never been a book like this. At once a poetics of place, a work of deep history, a bildungsroman, and an acute inquiry into the big subjects: love, family, other animals, the nature of creativity. It is sublime. It's also very funny. Haunting and haunted, Hold Still is the memoir of an artist that is art itself

Melissa Holbrook Pierson, author of The Place You Love is Gone