A Journalist Reports on Herself

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?”