A Journalist Reports on Herself

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Last November, journalist Leonora LaPeter Anton profiled a woman named Gretchen Molannen, who had been living for years with an almost unbearable chronic illness: persistent genital arousal disorder.

The day after the piece was published, Anton was notified that Molannen had committed suicide.

Now, a year later, Anton has written a difficult but necessary followup about her quest to figure out answers to the questions “Could I have done more to help her? Or more to the point, should I have avoided telling her story altogether?”


Lauren O'Neal is an MFA student at San Francisco State University. Her writing has appeared in publications like Slate, The New Inquiry, and The Hairpin. You can follow her on Twitter at @laureneoneal. More from this author →