Few of her friends knew that McCorkle's parents belonged to the Hemlock Society and that she grew up believing it was acceptable to take one's own life. Few people knew that after a stroke and a diagnosis of inoperable cancer in 1994, her father had killed himself with pills and a plastic bag, and that her mother's sister had also taken her own life a year later. Once, Susannah confided to Thea Lurie that the only reason she hadn't killed herself yet was because of the devastation it would cause her best friend.

"There are people who think about suicide and people who don't," Lurie says. "Susannah was someone who thought about suicide. She was someone for whom it was not a foreign idea."

But McCorkle gave no hint of her thoughts when she talked with clinical psychologist Eric Olson, a fan in Washington who became her lover in the late nineties, and who spent decades researching whether his father -- a CIA scientist who had been secretly given hallucinogens -- jumped or was thrown to his death from a hotel window. In 2001, she and Olson spoke for hours about technical details: how to get out the window, whether to go out headfirst or perch on the ledge, the minimum height required to ensure death. "I thought we were talking about my father," Olson says. "Now I wonder."

Four out of five suicides in the U.S. are men. It's a surprising statistic, given that women attempt suicide twice as often as men do. Unlike men, though, women tend to fail. The experts term their efforts "pleas for help" rather than serious efforts to die. But in what was apparently her first try at taking her own life, McCorkle succeeded. Further, instead of employing the most common means, namely guns, pills, or suffocation, she jumped, a method chosen by only 1 or 2 out of every 50 women of her age and background. Lurie believes she did so because she truly wanted to die and picked the most surefire means.

"One doctor who knew me and knew her," Lurie recalls, "said you have to realize that in a very real sense, Susannah died of natural causes."

Susannah McCorkle was an original literally from the day of her birth on New Year's Day, 1946, the official first day of the baby boom, in Berkeley, California. Her father, Tom, was an anthropology professor and academic nomad; her mother, Margery (known as Mimi), a housewife and part-time schoolteacher. The family, which included Katy, born in 1943, and Maggie, born in 1954, moved often; by the time Susannah graduated from high school in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, she had attended more than a dozen schools.

The McCorkle home was an oasis of liberal politics and progressive values. The kids called their parents by their first names, and there were few rules -- which made visiting a special treat for other kids. "Everything was so loose," recalls Susannah's cousin, Marianna Beatty. "If the adults had been up late having a party, we'd get leftover hors d'oeuvre for breakfast." But for Tom and Mimi's children, life at home sometimes felt too loose. "It wasn't a very kid-focused place," Maggie admits. "I think my parents were more interested in their own lives than in us."