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Email This Article When author Iris Chang caught a plane to Kentucky in August to plunge int o her next book project, she was already exhausted and depressed, her hu sband said yesterday. Planning to interview American survivors of one of the most brutal chapte rs of World War II history, the Bataan Death March, Chang was no strange r to the horrors of war. Her passion for human rights had resulted in he r best-known book, the 1997 bestseller, "The Rape of Nanking: The Forgot ten Holocaust of World War II." On Tuesday morning, after Chang, 36, was found dead in her car of an appa rent self-inflicted gunshot wound, her family and friends struggled to u nderstand how such an energetic and accomplished person could have reach ed a point of no return. Chang's husband, Brett Douglas, believes that she was already exhausted, emotionally and physically, when she left for Kentucky. "On top of the demands of being a working m other, she always pushed herself right to the limit. She pushed herself far beyond what she should have done a nd had to be taken to the hospital." After three days of hospitalization in Kentucky, she flew home. Chang soo n began seeing a psychiatrist who put her on medication, Douglas said. "There were up and down periods, but actually, we thought the suicide ris k was low," Douglas said. "There had been another time earlier in Septem ber, but she seemed to come out of that." In October, her condition was serious enough that the couple sent their s on to live with his paternal grandparents in Illinois. "She wouldn't just take time off" -- even though that meant diving back i nto the Bataan Death March material. "The accumulation of hearing those storie s, year after year after year, may have led to her depression. Of her death, her editor at Viking, Wendy Wolf, said, "I am as perplexed as anybody. The Iris I know was energetic and forward-looking and ambiti ous in a good way. "People came to her with their stories of suffering, and she tried to hel p them and tried to do something with their stories," Wolf added. Chang's agent, Susan Rabiner, said, "She had clinical depression, and it deepened rapidly over a period of about five months. I spoke to her on a regular basis, and recently she told me she couldn't go on with the pro ject. A representative of the Santa Clara County sheriff's office said detectiv es were not releasing information about the gun.
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