What happens to your writing once it leaves your hands? Dr. Phil gets it and self-righteously gums it up with that pushbroom crumbcatcher. Jessa points to this story of a journalist who’s distressed to see his piece lead national TV.

first began to notice the wisp of a girl with long black hair as I drove home from work in the evenings. She was usually standing on a corner beside a gas station in downtown Annapolis, her sliver of a face pockmarked, her dark eyes locked onto each passing vehicle. Her ragged clothes and weary demeanor were conspicuous along this busy downtown corridor, where leafy blocks of historic homes meet antique shops and cobblestone streets.

It took a few weeks for my curiosity to boil over, but I eventually pulled my car to the side of the road, approached her, and struck up a conversation. My press pass, I figured, was license enough to talk to whomever I pleased. Sarah, I learned, was a prostitute. I was a reporter at The Capital. A lot of people wanted something from this troubled twenty-four-year-old. I wanted a story.

What she told me that day, and over the weeks that followed, turned out not only to be a great story, but a minor media phenomenon, one that has taken Sarah all the way from her precarious existence on the streets of Annapolis to Dr. Phil’s coveted couch in Los Angeles. And yet it’s a story that has also left me with questions about the nature of the narrative I began to construct that day last April. With Sarah’s recent appearances on national television, these questions have only intensified.

Coveted couch? I’d think that couch would be like self-respect quicksand.