Author of "Rape of Nanking" commited suicide.

[journeymom]

Iris Chang

I haven't read her book but I remember hearing about it when it came out. As I read the article I wondered if researching the book lent to her suicide. But at the end it mentions she has a 2 y.o. ( ) and I thought, "aha", she had post partum depression. The poor woman. She must have hurt so much. I feel so sad for her husband and son.

[Tracy]

i heard about this too yesterday on NPR.
they played excerpts of one of her interviews from NPR and they played snippets from other interviews.
What happened in Nanking was just horrible. I didn't read the book but hearing her read it and what she said about it was just so tragic.

one of her friends when asked why he thought she might have committed suicide he said she lived the stuff she wrote about. She immersed herself in it. She would put up pictures of the events on her wall, she surrounded herself in the data...

it was all very dark troubling parts of mankind. He said she frequently cried about man's inhumanity towards other man.

I wish she was able to seperate from her work..take a break or something like that... I am so sad that her son will not have a mommy. That tragedy is so heartbreaking.

[Viola]

I was sad to hear about that too. My husband said she was working on a book on the US fighting the Japanese in the Philippines. I read the Rape of Nanking in 1998 when I was pregnant with my first daughter. I still have images from that book that come back to haunt me at key times.