—
## Before the Disappearance: The Ordinary Architecture of a Life in Redding
Redding, California sits in the northern Sacramento Valley at the foot of the Cascade Range. In 2016 it had a population of around 91,000 people, a regional hospital, a small university, a significant agricultural sector, and the kind of civic identity that attaches itself to communities that feel insulated from the more volatile pressures of the state’s larger cities. It is not a place that generates national headlines often. When it does, the attention tends to feel disorienting to residents who experience their city as ordinary in the way that most American cities, taken from the inside, are ordinary.
Sherri Papini had grown up in Shasta County. She had gone through schools there, had relationships there, had married and divorced before she met Keith Papini, and had built, in the years after their 2009 wedding, the kind of life that is easy to describe in shorthand: a house, children, a fitness routine, a social circle. Keith worked. Sherri managed the household and the children — a son and a daughter. She was 34 years old when she disappeared in November 2016.
The details that emerged after the hoax was exposed gave the background a different texture. Friends and former acquaintances described a pattern of behavior that had been visible, in retrospect, across her life: a tendency to create dramatic narratives when facing difficulty, to disappear into false versions of events, to be difficult to know fully even for people who considered themselves close. Asia Coleman, a friend who had known her since childhood, said, “That is how she used to deal with things as a child.” What Coleman described was not a person who suddenly broke under pressure in November 2016 but someone who had a long, if unverified-in-detail, history of similar behavior.