Leon Neyfakh
Leon Neyfakh is the host of Fiasco, the co-host of Think Twice: Michael Jackson and Backfired: Attention Deficit, and the co-creator, along with executive producer Andrew Parsons, of Slow Burn.…
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DISCLAIMER: This podcast is about suicide. Listener discretion is advised
“When Michael and I got together some 40 plus years ago, we’d always planned on checking out together.”
In February of 2024, a letter arrived at the pharmacy in Astoria, Oregon. It was from local residents Petra and Michael Mathers, and they wanted to let the pharmacists know that they had died—by suicide. Petra was a celebrated children’s book author and illustrator. Michael was a photographer. And as police investigated their deaths, they discovered a whole network of people around the country who had received similar letters.
Journalists Leon Neyfakh and Alice Gregory, who have themselves been married for more than 10 years, visit Oregon to begin putting together the pieces of Petra and Michael’s shared life: the start of their love story, and the end. And they set out to interview everyone who received a letter from Michael and Petra, to try to understand why a couple who was seemingly so happy and in love would want to end their lives.
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The Hosts
Alice Gregory
Alice Gregory is a journalist and critic for publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and n+1. She has…
Katy Hessel
Katy Hessel, host of Death of an Artist: Krasner & Pollock, is an art historian, author, curator and broadcaster. Through her The Great Women Artists Podcast and Instagram account, which foreground women…
Helen Molesworth
Helen Molesworth, host of Death of an Artist Season 1, is a writer and a curator based in Los Angeles. She is the host of David Zwirner’s PROGRAM, a video interview…
