A book called The Pain Diaries by author/journalist Melanie Thernstrom, which attempts to examine the phenomenon of pain in the close and attentive way Andrew Solomon and William Styron have written of depression, was won in a spirited auction by Becky Saletan at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. She paid what agent Henry Dunow calls "a healthy mid-six figures" for world rights in a book that will combine reportage and personal narrative on the author's own struggle against chronic pain, which is a disease suffered by millions of Americans. Thernstrom, who is the author of two true-crime books, Dead Girl and Halfway Heaven, has expanded an article on chronic pain she wrote for the New York Times Magazine into the book.