On March 22, America’s Most Wanted told my story. I wasn’t the fugitive, or the victim, and it shouldn’t have been my story. It should have been Tyeisha’s. But as the producer from amw told me, “Girls die in ditches every day. The reason Tyeisha stands out is because she was profiled in Seventeen magazine.” I met Tyeisha Martin at a Red Cross shelter in Henry County, Georgia, on a sunny September afternoon in 2005. She was barefoot, wearing a tank top and Capri jeans, waiting in line to get a tetanus shot. I was living in a small town nearby called McDonough, south of Atlanta. I’d moved there a year earlier from New York City with my boyfriend. We were both writers, still thinking we might be able to publish the novels we’d written in grad school. I knew I wanted to write for a living, but I’d left my job at a women’s magazine certain I’d never go back.

I didn’t like what I’d been able to write in that world. Every time I put together an article, it felt like I was building a little lie. Whether it was culled from quotes e-mailed through a publicist, like the cover story I did on the movie star; or built upon crude stereotypes, like the “profile” of the three beauty queens who lived together in Trump Place; or the time I followed the rules of a dating book and neatly concluded that it’s better to just be yourself if you want to meet a guy. My instincts as a writer were nowhere in these stories. They weren’t little windows on the human condition, they didn’t wrestle with questions about the world; they passed the time on the StairMaster, at the dentist, by the pool.

I justified it plenty....

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