What Remains Unknown

The woman I wrote about in June has not responded to my last four messages.

I want to say first, because some readers have asked, that she is not in any danger. I have confirmed that through other channels. She is well, as far as anyone can tell. She appears to have simply stopped talking to me.

What happened

After I published The Experiment, E. and I spoke twice more. Both conversations were long. In the second, she gave me access to a further set of notes, covering a period she had been reluctant to discuss. She said she wanted me to have the whole picture before I wrote anything else.

Then she stopped replying. No falling out, no request to withdraw anything. A message, unanswered. Then another.

I have been doing this work long enough to know that sources go quiet for many reasons, most of them ordinary. People get busy, or tired, or decide that talking to a journalist was a mistake. I don't know which of these applies to E. I may never know.

What I still have

I have the notes she shared, all of them, including the last set. I have my own record of our conversations. I have the two independent accounts from people who knew her. And I have five years of research that, in places, seems to describe what she was doing from the outside.

That is a great deal of material. It is not the same as her.

The last notes are different from the earlier ones. The handwriting is the same, but the entries are shorter and further apart, and some pages have only a date. There is one long entry near the end that I have read more times than I can count. I don't yet understand it, and I don't want to describe it until I do.

I have also gone back over our conversations, looking for signs I missed. There may not be any. She was as careful in the last one as in the first.

What I am not prepared to say

I am not prepared to say the investigation is over. There are things in the last notes I haven't understood yet, and some of them may explain why she stopped.

I am also not prepared to publish things she didn't agree to. She gave me the notes to understand, not to print. Until she tells me otherwise, I will treat that as binding.

Why I am still writing about it

A colleague asked me last week why I don't simply let this go. A source stopped talking; that happens. My honest answer is that E.'s account touches almost everything I have written here for five years, from The Attraction Killer to Attention Is the Technique. If she is right, it changes how I read much of that work. If she is wrong, I want to understand why so many of the details fit.

What I owe readers

Several of you have written to ask what the changes were. I understand why. I wrote about E. because I thought her story mattered, and then I told you very little.

What I can do is be honest about where things stand. I know more than I have written. I know less than I need to. And I am continuing to work through what she left me.

In the meantime, I keep returning to something she said in our last conversation. I asked her whether she would recommend the experiment to other women. She was quiet for a long time. Then she said that it wasn't a recommendation. It was a record.

I didn't understand what she meant at the time. I think I am beginning to.