EVANSTON, Ill. — A few months after Emily Maloney tried to kill herself, she finally opened her mail. She was 19, living in Iowa City, an undergraduate at University of Iowa. She felt she never really knew how to be a person in the world. In high school, back in Lake Forest, Illinois, she wore wedding dresses and combat boots to class, she wore bowlers and tuxedos. She said she never did fit in alongside the young scions of Chicago’s business barons. She graduated early, and now, alone in Iowa City, she was depressed. She was recovering.
The mail piled up.
We met the other day at a coffee house in Evanston, down the street from her home. She’s 36 now, with big dark eyes and an agreeable, casually blunt disposition. That suicide attempt — that was her first and only attempt, she explained, but she had been hospitalized before, on the fear that she might kill herself. She spoke informally, then with the precision of the health care industry, which she knows now a little too intimately.
