Terry Greene Sterling

We hippie chicks belong to a liberal subgroup of the baby boom generation, that graying postwar population tsunami that threatens to bankrupt America’s Social Security system. The U.S. Census defines baby boomers as American men and women 35 to 54 years old. Hippie chicks belong to the elder strata (45 to 54 years old) of female baby boomers. According to Census 2000, there are more than 19 million women in this age group, about 13.4 percent of the country’s population. My instinct tells me hippie chicks compose at least half of this particular demographic, which means, by my count, there are about 9.5 million of us.

For the record, hippie chicks are not and have never been hippies. Real hippies dropped too much acid and shot speed and roamed Route 66 in painted school buses. In their altered states, real hippies did not always bathe or brush their teeth. They were known to eat things like Hostess fruit pies for breakfast. They were not averse to having children out of wedlock and naming them after a winter month, an Indian chief or a predatory bird. Real hippies tended to ignore their formal educations.

Hippie chicks, on the other hand, were young women influenced by, but not wholly devoted to, the countercultural movement of the ’60s and ’70s. Although we pretended otherwise, we really did value our educations, and graduated from college in unprecedented numbers. We savored Acapulco Gold. We listened to Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Country Joe and the Fish, Dylan, Donovan, the Beatles. We marched down campus malls protesting the military-industrial complex and the fact that no organic food was served in the college cafeteria.

We eschewed sororities. We believed in zero population growth and trumpeted the salubrious effects of the Pill, which at the time was a recent scientific breakthrough. We attended our classes barefoot, accompanied by dogs. We waxed eloquent about Carlos Castaneda, Kent State, Vietnam and the head busting at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. In short, we considered ourselves experts in matters of cannabis, public policy, morality and beauty.

I think our idea of beauty was all mixed up with the gender revolution that was sweeping America at the time. Androgyny was fashionable. We didn’t wear bras. We didn’t wear makeup. We didn’t dye our long, uncut hair. We didn’t shave our legs or our pits.

A lot of people think Jane Fonda was a hippie chick because of her anti-Vietnam antics. Wrong. With her Barbarella bod and perfectly coiffed hair, Fonda was much, much too well-groomed and uptight to be a hippie chick. Joan Baez, on the other hand, was our idea of beautiful. She was hairy and sloppy and comfortable with herself even though she had a big nose.

We frequently viewed our well-groomed mothers as unsuspecting victims of male domination. They suffered through cosmetic surgery, we reasoned, because they felt they had to look attractive to their husbands in order to ensure their own survival. They were helpless housewives. They had no way of supporting themselves. They were sex slaves. We tried to explain all of this to our mothers, but they didn’t seem to understand.

Looking back on it, I think our “natural” beauty code was at least as rigid as our mothers’. Our hand-sewn granny dresses from Vermont might have chafed our young nipples, but we wouldn’t slip on a bra for comfort. We poured our nubile buns into bell-bottoms so tight they cut off our circulation and numbed the skin covering our hip bones. We wore ergonomically correct shoes even if they caused corns. We did all of this to look attractive to men. And we didn’t comprehend our hypocrisy.

Then we got old.

As we aged, we realized we weren’t all that enlightened after all. We struggled with divorce and children and careers and illness and the loss of parents and friends. And it all began to show in our faces. (“Smile,” strangers would tell us on the street, “life can’t be that bad.”) We reluctantly acknowledged that coloring the gray and wearing bras and patting on makeup to conceal the circles beneath our eyes improved our looks.

But at some point even those stopgaps failed us. We would come home from work to a messy house, suck on a glass of pinot grigio and glimpse our aging faces in the mirror as we changed out of our work clothes. We’d furtively inch up to the mirror, pinch back the gobblerlike wattles that dangled beneath our middle-aged chins and wonder if cosmetic surgery was really such a terrible thing after all.

For several months, I myself suffered through this crisis, living in a wattle-pinching, should-I-get-a-face-lift purgatory. I knew that I looked grumpy even when I was happy, largely because of a sagging forehead and terrier-like jowls. My neck flaps didn’t help, either.

I wanted a face-lift and felt guilty about it because I was, after all, a hippie chick.

My husband, who is too old to be a baby boomer and does not understand hippie chick sensibilities, bore the brunt of my angst. He listened to my jeremiads about how aging women should not cave to a youth-oriented society. Five minutes later he’d watch me pinch my wrinkles in front of the mirror. What harm, I’d ask him, would come from a natural, organic, hippie chick kind of face-lift, one that would preserve my smile lines and the crow’s-feet while nuking the wattles and jowls?

“It’s your decision,” he would say. “I think you look just fine the way you are.”

My hippie chick friends agreed with my husband. But I could tell they mostly disapproved of the surgery. Of all my hippie chick friends, not a single woman has had cosmetic surgery.

“With all of the awful things that we have to go through in life,” one hippie chick girlfriend finally said, “I don’t understand why you would volunteer to put yourself through another awful experience just to look younger.”

She had me there. And she tweaked another nerve: I did not trust doctors. As a journalist, I’d written several investigative stories about medical malpractice cases. I couldn’t forget the case of a woman who woke up from a tummy tuck with pubic hair covering her belly button.

Last December, a checkout clerk at the natural foods store asked me for my senior card. To qualify as senior in this particular establishment, one has to 60 years and older.

I was 52.

That did it. I vowed to find a good board-certified plastic surgeon and get on with it. I figured finding a doctor sensitive to hippie chicks would be a snap. If there are 9 million aging hippie chicks in America, we must have influence in the plastic surgery market, dramatically changing the aesthetic toward a more organic, natural outcome.

I figured wrong.

In the first place, although 6.5 million women of all ages had cosmetic plastic surgery in 2001, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons only a scant 112,609 women of all ages had face-lifts. About half as many had brow lifts. (Breast augmentation, eye jobs, nose jobs and liposuction were the most popular procedures.)

What’s more, judging from the before and after pictures of face-lift patients on the Web site of the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, it seemed to me that a lot of the women who did have face-lifts came out looking like Beverly Hills real estate agents.

No self-respecting hippie chick would ever want to look like a Beverly Hills real estate agent. Obviously, hippie chicks weren’t getting face-lifts in the numbers I had suspected.

And interviews with doctors across the country bore this out. Harlan Pollock, a longtime Dallas plastic surgeon who teaches at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, told me what most often drives women to plastic surgery is “movies and advertising that put a premium on beauty and youth.”

Alan Gold, a Long Island plastic surgeon who serves as a spokesman for the American Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, was more blunt: “I do not live in an area where there is peace, love and granola.”

Before I visited a doctor, I made sure he was board certified by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, because such certification ensures more training and the passing of a rigorous exam. Next, I checked court records and medical board files for malpractice cases.

I consulted with several male doctors who passed all these tests. But I wasn’t comfortable with them. They were cheesy. And their female staff members and patients in their waiting rooms made me squirm in my Birkenstocks. With frosted hair and wrinkle-free faces, they reminded me of the trophy wives of oil company executives. I did not want to emerge from the operating room looking like that.

I decided a woman doctor might understand me better. But it took a while to find one. Although more than 91 percent of cosmetic surgery patients are female, only one in nine plastic surgeons is a woman. Plastic surgery is still very much a male-dominated profession.

A non-hippie chick friend recommended Dr. B., a board-certified plastic surgeon at the Phoenix Mayo Clinic. During the consultation, I nervously explained that I wanted a 52-year-old face to match my 52-year-old body.

“You earned those wrinkles,” she told me. “Let’s keep some of them.” She was warm and honest. She recommended a face-lift, eye job and a brow lift so that everything would match. If I chose just one procedure, she said, I wouldn’t look right.

“No one will know you’ve had a face-lift, it will be that natural,” she said. Then she gave me a hug.

I knew the woman understood my concept of a natural face-lift, possibly because she once lived in New Mexico, a hippie chick stronghold. But I was terrified of the pain, and opted to test the waters with an eye job in the late fall of 2001. After surviving that surgery with the aid of Mother’s Little Helpers, in this case Vicodin and Valium, I scheduled the face-lift and brow lift for Jan. 15, 2002.

Psychologically, having the eyes done first gave me the confidence to continue with the more severe surgery. But it was expensive. I had to pay anesthesia and operating room fees twice. Dr. B’s fees were right in line with the national averages reported by the American Society of Plastic Surgery, but I still ended up paying a total of about $15,000 for the two procedures.

What can I say about cosmetic surgery beyond the fact that it is expensive?

It hurts. They pull your skin off your face and snip your muscles and suck out your fat and when it’s all over they staple and glue and stitch you shut.

Even so, recovery time is not all that long if you take the right drugs. I stayed home for two weeks with a bag of frozen peas on my forehead and the Vicodin conveniently nearby. A week later, I went skiing.

Dr. B was right. No one can tell I’ve had a face-lift. The scarring is not evident and I still look like a natural hippie chick, with my smile lines and crow’s-feet. The wattles and jowls are gone, but even my hippie chick friends concede I look more refreshed and happy — as if I’ve had a good night’s sleep.

And the checkout clerk no longer asks me for my senior card.

Then, at about 9:36 p.m., Sen. John McCain steps onto the stage, thumbs up, smiling, with his wife, Cindy. The crowd whoops and roars. McCain’s red tie matches Cindy’s red suit. He thanks his wife for her support, and Cindy tears up. She steps back with the other dignitaries, including Sen. Joe Lieberman, Sen. Lindsey Graham and Roberta McCain, the candidate’s nonagenarian mother, as they applaud.

After all, this is an unexpected victory. McCain is projected to win eight states at this moment, which almost ensures that he’ll be the Republican Party’s presidential candidate in November. McCain overcame an impoverished campaign chest, bleak early polling numbers, an unenthusiastic, sometimes downright hostile conservative Republican base, Rush Limbaugh, and Mitt Romney to become the party’s probable presidential nominee.

“We are the captains of our fate,” he says.

“We can overcome any challenge,” he says.

McCain’s on a roll. Whether those in the party’s conservative base, who are particularly distressed over McCain’s stance on immigration — they say he favors amnesty for millions of undocumented immigrants already here, and his supporters say he favors a “controlled pathway to citizenship” — will swallow their pride and support McCain simply because he’s, well, on an electability surge, remains to be seen. With his strong following of independent voters, McCain may not need that fringe to win the nomination. But he extends an olive branch to the neocons anyway, vowing to reach out to them because he believes in their principles. He also marks his territory, saying he looks forward to “leading” the Republican Party.

In Arizona, 28 percent of voters are registered independents, and they’ve helped send McCain to the Senate. Now a growing national electorate of independents may give McCain a shot at the White House.

“We will reject appeals of retreat and timidity … we will keep America safe,” McCain says, alluding to the cornerstone of his campaign — national security, a victorious Iraq war and the success of the surge. Then he stumbles a tiny bit when he walks off the stage and into the crowd of well-wishers. After all, he’s 71 years old and has just completed a marathon coast-to-coast campaign stump.

Anyone who has lived in Arizona for a long time knows McCain has staying power. His 1980 marriage to Cindy Hensley, the daughter of a wealthy Phoenix beer distributor, catapulted him into political prominence in Arizona. He was elected senator in 1987, and hasn’t looked back since, despite the fact that he was investigated by the Senate Ethics Committee in 1990 for his role in the Keating Five scandal, which involved McCain and four other senators meeting with regulators investigating the failed savings-and-loan empire of his financier friend Charles Keating. He didn’t look back when Cindy confessed to a drug addiction (she’s over it), and he didn’t look back when he underwent surgery for a particularly nasty melanoma. Nor did he look back when he lost a bid for the 2000 presidential nomination. He just soldiered on.

McCain’s Arizona supporters don’t worry too much that their man has alienated the Republican base, and he has rarely had the support of neocons in the state anyway. Bob Thrasher, a 39-year-old real estate attorney, described himself as a “Goldwater Republican,” which is how he views McCain.

“Of all candidates on the ballot McCain is the closest to Goldwater,” he says.

State Rep. Doug Clark, hopes that neocons running the Republican Party in Arizona will “bury the hatchet and throw everything behind McCain,” even if McCain doesn’t really need them to win. And maybe that trend will extend across the nation, he says.

By 10:30 p.m., the McCains have vanished, the Arizona Biltmore ballroom is rapidly emptying. Before midnight Arizona’s maverick is projected to win delegate-rich California and is well on his way to the presidential nomination.

“Latinos I believe will favor Hillary Clinton because she is familiar to them and they are comfortable with her,” Pastor told Salon.

Popular Gov. Janet Napolitano, on the other hand, has endorsed Barack Obama. The Latino community is sharply divided over immigration issues, and Napolitano drew criticism in 2007 when she signed into law a bill sanctioning employers who hire illegal immigrants.

Arizona’s 673,000 Latino voters, 17 percent of the electorate, will be critically important to the outcome of Tuesday’s Democratic primary, and their choice of candidates could be an indicator of how the Latino vote will break nationally. A January poll showed that Arizona Latinos favored Clinton by almost four to one over Barack Obama, but with nearly one in three voters undecided.

Arcelia Carrasco, a 52-year-old food-processing plant worker, was standing in line to vote for Clinton at the Greater Phoenix church at noon. She had started work at 4 a.m. and reported to the polling place after an eight-hour shift of chopping vegetables. Carrasco, now an American citizen, has been battling to get legal work status in America for her 30-year-old son, who was born in Mexico. She opposes the employer sanctions act, but that didn’t turn her against Obama. She voted for Clinton simply because she figured if anyone could help her, Clinton could, because Clinton is a mother too.

“I voted with my heart,” Carrasco said.

She has also authored seven books, including “The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative,” published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1996. It is a book widely respected by teachers and students of the memoir genre, in part, because Gornick herself is a respected memoirist. Her chronicle of her relationship to her mother, “Fierce Attachments,” made Gornick a literary star when it appeared in 1987. At the time, the New York Times hailed Gornick’s memoir as a “fine, unflinchingly honest book.” In the past few years, Gornick’s critical essays and book reviews have appeared in a number of venues, from the Times to Salon.

On July 28, Gornick spoke to about 50 of the Goucher students and staff who gathered to hear her for about an hour, then ended with a few moving and beautifully written excerpts from “Fierce Attachments,” a memoir structured around Gornick’s walks with her mother in New York City. Then she answered questions from the audience — and shocked her listeners by describing the liberties she’d taken with the truth. Her revelations transformed the session into a debate seminar about truth vs. creative license in the post-Jayson Blair era.

Gornick admitted she had “composed” some of the walks and conversations with her mother in the memoir, and had also invented a scene that involved a street person and her mother. She said this matter-of-factly, and said she considered memoir to be in the genre of “personal narrative,” not journalism.

But just a few minutes later, Gornick said she’d also used composite characters for some of her pieces that ran in the Village Voice. She gave two examples — conversations at a dinner party in New York, and a man who lived in a high rise and robbed stores at night.

Gornick was quickly grilled by her audience. It was surely a culture clash: a sophisticated New York memoirist facing off against a crowd that included highly regarded journalists. But it left some students scratching their heads afterward, trying to understand when fabricated information is acceptable in nonfiction — and when does it make you Jayson Blair?

During the questioning, I glanced over at Patsy Sims, the director of the Goucher program, a former newspaper reporter who has authored four nonfiction books. Sims looked miserable. She would later tell me: “I was stunned. I had no idea Gornick had taken these liberties … I felt I had 43 students with whom we try to instill the importance of not making things up … I also knew Gornick was uncomfortable and I felt badly for anything she might be feeling.”

Tom French, a Pulitzer Prize winner from the St. Petersburg Times and a member of the Goucher MFA faculty, politely asked Gornick how she would feel if the tables had been turned, if Gornick’s mother had invented stories about her daughter and had written about them as though they were true.

The question, Gornick replied, was “unanswerable.”

Another member of the audience asked Gornick whether she had alerted readers to the inventions of certain scenes and dialogue with, say, a prefatory note?

“No,” she replied, her readers were “willfully ignorant.”

When I spoke with Gornick by phone a few days after the seminar, she denied saying that she had ever “made up” anything in her memoir, although certain “conversations and circumstances are composed.” She believes with all her heart that her memoir is honest. She once wrote in the New York Times that the narrator in “Fierce Attachments” is “me and at the same time not me,” a “nonfiction persona” who could “tell the truth as I could not.”

Gornick also denied that she had made up composite characters for some of her Village Voice stories. I pressed her a little. She denied it again. But I canvassed 26 people who attended the lecture, and asked if they recalled Gornick talking about using composite characters for some of her Village Voice pieces. Of those, 20 recalled that she’d talked about using either “made-up characters” or “composite characters” in some of her Voice pieces. Six could not remember either way.

I phoned Don Forst, editor in chief of the Village Voice, and asked him what he thought of compound characters in newspaper stories. Forst signed on at the Village Voice in 1996, long after Gornick had moved on. But he told me Gornick “wouldn’t do that under my editorship. If she did it once that would be the end of it … I don’t go for it.”

Many masterpieces of “creative nonfiction” have been criticized for sacrificing truth for a good read, and they include Norman Mailer’s “Executioner’s Song,” Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” and Joseph Mitchell’s “Old Mr. Flood.”

But the memoir, in particular, seems to be the most factually fudged genre of nonfiction writing.

In 2001, Jennifer Lauck’s wildly successful childhood memoir, “Blackbird,” came under fire from her own family; her stepbrother chronicled 100 errors he said he found in the book. Many modern memoirists hedge their bets; Dave Eggers deliberately called his book “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” fiction, though it closely mirrored his own life. Rick Marin, whose “Cad” came out earlier this year, has blithely told reporters it is a “lightly fictionalized memoir.” And Augusten Burroughs included the following note in his second memoir, “Dry,” which came out in June: “This memoir is based on my experiences over a 10-year period. Names have been changed, characters combined and events compressed. Certain episodes are imaginative re-creation, and those episodes are not intended to portray actual events.” That prompted the Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley to fume: “There’s a word for that: fiction.”

In response, Burroughs told Salon, “It’s weird to me that the old man at the Washington Post would think the disclaimer in the beginning of ‘Dry’ somehow means I made everything up. What I did was make up the beer commercial I talk about in the book and merge a couple of ad people together into one. Ad people are all pretty similar, so who cares? Because I changed these small details, I had to put that disclaimer at the front of the book, to make my publisher comfortable with the fact that these things were fabricated.” Burroughs added, “If I were going to make up a story, I certainly wouldn’t mine such tired, overworked territory as ‘recovery.’”

Fabrications happen “all the time” in memoirs, according to Charles McGrath, the editor of the New York Times Book Review. McGrath says that in an ideal world, journalistic standards would apply to memoirs, though they frequently don’t. A memoir ought to be as true as it can possibly be and if it is not the reader should be alerted to that fact.

Walt Harrington, a former Washington Post writer who has written five books, including a recently published memoir, “The Everlasting Stream: A True Story of Rabbits, Guns, Friendship and Family,” is a member of the Goucher MFA faculty. He had attended the Goucher talk, and had questioned Gornick intensely about her ethics. He still seemed frustrated afterward.

Gornick, he said, is a “great writer and a great thinker” whose standard is “acceptable among many people writing nonfiction.” Wouldn’t her “willfully ignorant” readers feel tricked when they discovered parts of a work they thought was true was, in fact, not? Harrington said he once spoke with an editor in a prominent publishing house about the shape his future memoir might take. The editor had wanted Harrington to make the piece more “story-like.” “He wanted me to trust my memory,” Harrington said, “which is to me a code for ‘You can make it up as long as you don’t tell anybody.’”

Harrington chose a different publishing house, the Atlantic Monthly Press, and said he purposefully put “True Story” in the subtitle.

Gornick, meanwhile, chooses to leaves it up to the reader to decide. “I cannot defend it, ” she said of her writing. “The writing has to defend itself.”

Berardino did not mention, for instance, Andersen’s alleged accounting fraud in the collapse of the Baptist Foundation of Arizona, possibly the largest bankruptcy of a religious foundation in the history of the United States.

Instead, Berardino said at one point during the hearing: “We are human beings, and we do not get it right all the time.”

Despite Berardino’s evasions, Congress is finding out more about Andersen’s history. On Feb. 7, congressional Democrats in Washington are expected to call a news conference to link the scandal-ridden Enron debacle to the bankruptcy of a Phoenix-based Southern Baptist religious foundation called the Baptist Foundation of Arizona (BFA).

Practically anyone in Arizona will tell you the Democrats are about three and a half years too late, largely because the national press in its East Coast provincialism refused to cover the Baptist Foundation collapse in any meaningful way, if at all.

The link between Enron and BFA that the Democrats will announce is the way Arthur Andersen handled the books of both failed companies — by giving them two thumbs up even as they were plummeting toward bankruptcy.

The long-ignored collapse of BFA is every bit as tragic as the Enron failure. In 1999, BFA filed for bankruptcy in Phoenix, leaving in the lurch 13,000 mostly elderly investors who collectively lost more than $590 million. Arizona Attorney General Janet Napolitano called the BFA collapse the largest bankruptcy of a religious nonprofit in the history of the United States.

BFA investors are Christian folk who live throughout the United States, men and women who assumed they’d invested their money wisely because they believed neither Arthur Andersen accountants nor the pious Southern Baptist salesmen who promoted BFA’s high-interest notes would deceive them. So far, BFA investors have received pennies on their dollars from bankruptcy settlements, but they will share part of a $21 million settlement from BFA’s lawyers at the Phoenix law firm Jennings, Strouss and Salmon, who have not admitted wrongdoing.

But, of course, the deep pockets in both the Enron and the BFA debacles now belong to Arthur Andersen, which claims to be a $7 billion company.

All of this explains why two Arizona attorneys general have tried to force Andersen to pay back the BFA victims.

So far, they’ve failed.

But they keep trying.

Currently, Andersen faces action by the Arizona Board of Accountancy and Arizona Attorney General’s Office, as well as two ongoing civil lawsuits in state court alleging Andersen’s accounting fraud deceived BFA investors. And several of BFA’s key managers have been indicted for alleged white-collar fraud in state court, although all await their trials.

In Arizona, Andersen has adamantly denied wrongdoing, pointing its finger instead at the company it audited and accusing BFA management of hiding fraud from the auditors. You can expect to hear a lot of that reasoning from Andersen in the Enron case.

But there are many more similarities between BFA and Enron. In public records relating to the BFA collapse in Arizona, Andersen is accused of:

Her book was one of the first to cash in on the ongoing memoir craze and was best known for Laake’s mocking, detailed revelation of top-secret Mormon temple ceremonies and, oddly enough, for her lengthy account of years of obsessive-compulsive masturbation, which she blamed indirectly on Mormonism. Laake even became a hit on the talk show circuit, where, beyond fielding questions about masturbation, she tried to explain why her religion very nearly destroyed her.

But the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints did not react happily to “Secret Ceremonies.” After its publication, church leaders excommunicated Laake for apostasy.

There were reasons Mormon elders couldn’t abide the book, which makes them — and Mormonism — seem silly and cruel and dangerous. For instance, Laake describes a series of Mormon bishops, or spiritual advisors, as stupid, rigid, insensitive and occasionally voyeuristic. She makes fun of little old ladies called “Temple Helpers” who dressed her for the first time in “garments,” or holy underwear, which she was instructed to wear all her life. (Throughout the book, she makes fun of her garments, which she finally sheds for good a few years later.) She details her Mormon Temple wedding, which includes a ceremony in which her fiancé “Monty” pulls her through “the veil” with a secret grip during a pre-wedding ceremony. “Well done, thou good and faithful servant, enter you into the joy of the Lord,” she recalls Monty telling her.

The book is still controversial; just log onto Amazon to see the emotions the book elicits. Even today readers either trash Laake for whining endlessly about her problems or elevate her to sainthood for writing a tell-all book about the Mormon Church.

I remember standing in the bookstore after buying the first edition of “Secret Ceremonies,” leafing through the pages, being taken aback when I saw that Laake had put my name in the acknowledgments. She said I was part of a “community of writers” who “provided unstinting help and encouragement whenever [she] needed it.” I was even more surprised when she signed my copy of the book this way: “I miss you like hell. Love, Deborah Laake.” I did not recall our working years together during the late 1980s and early 1990s at Phoenix New Times as being particularly warm, intimate or deserving of “Love, Deborah Laake,” and I did not think she had any reason to miss me “like hell” when she went on her book tours.

Looking back on it, I realize I failed to recognize the extent of her mental illness, which often took the form of extreme self-absorption and out-of-control boastful egotism. When Laake won a top state writing award in 1989, she ordered an editorial assistant to bring a dozen long-stemmed American Beauties to the awards ceremony so Laake could clutch them to her bosom during an offensively self-congratulatory acceptance speech. The award has been passed out for decades, and no winner before or since has ever demanded roses.

Laake was a close friend and protégé of Michael Lacey, the paper’s owner and executive editor, and because of their relationship I think she believed she could pick on other staffers with relative impunity.

And she did. She challenged those few editors and other writers whom she perceived as threats to her self-imposed status as the paper’s alpha female and/or best writer. For instance, the first week Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Tom Fitzpatrick arrived at our paper from Chicago, Laake attacked him for stealing an idea she’d already chosen for her column. The two never spoke again.

Laake also picked fights with Paul Rubin, an enormously popular writer with readers. Like Laake, Rubin frequently wrote crime stories with strong narratives. We other writers often wondered aloud if Laake was threatened by Rubin because he had won more national and state awards than she.

I never clashed with Laake, because I was best known for my investigative reporting and Laake told me several times she “would never” do my kind of journalism. No one reads that stuff, she said. I, on the other hand, was a fan of Laake’s writing, a combination of great details that made readers squirm (like her explicit accounts of her masturbation bouts), languorous Southern rhythms and unexpected gonzo punches. Laake liked to think of herself as a brutally honest journalist, and she was, except when she wrote about herself.

After reading “Secret Ceremonies” for the third time, shortly after her suicide, I realized she had blamed Mormonism and the men in her life for her mental illness, for the terrible dark spells that followed the giddy manic highs. “Secret Ceremonies” is nevertheless a fascinating and compelling read about Laake’s struggle to survive waves of self-destructive depression.

Sadly, the book was Laake’s last serious writing effort; she developed breast cancer shortly after it was published. Although she recovered from the cancer, she blamed the lingering side effects of chemotherapy for preventing her from writing again. I often wondered whether she was actually paralyzed by depression.

She tried to run. During the last years of her life, Laake moved from Phoenix to Charleston, S.C., back to Phoenix, then back to Charleston, where she finally killed herself.

During her last stay in Phoenix, the depression deepened. She remained isolated, reached out, then became isolated again. As I began to understand that she was seriously mentally ill, and her fragility became apparent to me, I was no longer wary of her. I understood how brave she’d been to even show up at the office on days when the depression gripped her.

I also learned that when she could manage to talk herself into getting out of her house, she was a marvelous storyteller and a real listener. We had lunch, exchanged e-mails and talked on the phone. I asked her to help edit some of my columns, thinking it would help my writing and her depression, but she said she was still too sick from the chemo. She said she didn’t like journalism much anymore; she worried that it was too mean-spirited and negative for her, that it would attract a negative energy — and that that wouldn’t be wise, what with her fragile health and all.

I reminded her of her successful book, her many journalism awards, and asked her if she missed the limelight.

“It all seems so long ago,” she said.

At that moment I realized how much she’d changed. In the old days she’d corner me in my office and tell me about her latest coup on a talk show, or how much money her book was making, or how the Mormons hated her, just hated her, or how her readers adored her. Now, it seemed, none of these things mattered to her. Problem was, she’d found nothing to fill their place.

The last time I saw Laake was in March 1999. Her mother had died, and I had dinner with her and other friends after attending her mother’s wake. She wore her trademark short linen shift, high-heeled sandals and a flowing scarf. She’d had her makeup done at Saks Fifth Avenue. During dinner, she fell apart. She wept that Mormon leaders would not allow her to eulogize her mother during an upcoming church funeral, wouldn’t even let her sit in the front of the church with the family. Of course, she should have expected such a reaction after ripping into the Mormon church in “Secret Ceremonies,” but she couldn’t recognize the ugly logic; her mind was too clouded by depression and grief and pills. I phoned her after the funeral, but she never returned the calls. I later learned she’d moved back to Charleston.

I don’t know how many pills she swallowed on Feb. 4; all I know is, she finally managed to kill herself. It was at least her fourth suicide attempt. She was 47 years old.

After Laake died, I was so furious with her that I refused to write a letter in support of her nomination for a posthumous journalism award. I said Laake didn’t deserve the award. She had not influenced my writing or anyone else’s, I lied. As the months passed, I realized I was angry because on some level I felt abandoned. After 14 years, Laake was finally starting to become a friend.

And I missed her — still miss her — like hell.