![]() She took literally the symbolism of the parties, meant to mark her entry into adulthood. In the morning, she told her family that she didn’t want to be alive. By the end of the party, she was sobbing so hard that the escort she’d invited to the ball had to put her in a cab. That night, before walking onstage, Laura did cocaine and chugged champagne. She wears a thin pearl necklace, and her blond hair is coiled in an ornate bun. Yet, in pictures before the second ball, Laura is slightly hunched over, as if trying to minimize the breadth of her muscular shoulders. “That was a recurring theme: whether the surface of people can ever harmonize with what’s inside their minds.” “I remember talking with her a lot about surfaces,” a classmate, Patrick Bensen, said. Other times, she was a postmodern nihilist, deconstructing the arbitrariness of language. Sometimes she fashioned herself as a “fun, down-to-earth girl” who drank until early morning with boys who considered her chill. Her roommate, Bree Tse, said, “Laura just blew me away-she was this golden girl, so vibrant and attentive and in tune with people.” On her first day at Harvard, Laura wandered the campus and thought, This is everything I’ve been working for. She hoped that she might discover a more authentic version of herself at Harvard, where she arrived as a freshman in 2001. She hid the pills in a jewelry box in her closet and then washed them down the sink. Laura was given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and prescribed Depakote, a mood stabilizer that, the previous year, had been approved for treating bipolar patients. Her parents took her to a family therapist, who, after several months, referred her to a psychiatrist. “The pain felt so real and raw and mine,” she said. She had friends at school who cut themselves with razors, and she was intrigued by what seemed to be an act of defiance. She snapped at her mother, locked herself in her room, and talked about wanting to die. The oldest of three sisters, Laura felt as if she were living two separate lives, one onstage and the other in the audience, reacting to an exhausting performance. But she doubted whether she had a “real self underneath.” She was one of those rare proportional adolescents with a thriving social life. In eighth grade, in 1996, Laura was the class president-she ran on a platform of planting daffodils on the school’s grounds-and among the best squash players in the country. ![]() Her father is related to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and her mother was introduced to society at a débutante ball at the Waldorf-Astoria. She grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, one of the wealthiest communities in the country. Laura Delano recognized that she was “excellent at everything, but it didn’t mean anything,” her doctor wrote. ![]() This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. ![]()
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