The Dead Girl

by Melanie Thernstrom, David Shields (Introduction)

Melanie Thernstrom’s senior thesis was entitled Mistakes of Metaphor, an account of the mysterious disappearance and murder of her best friend, Bibi Lee. That thesis, reworked as The Dead Girl, was published by Pocket Books in 1990 to major critical acclaim.
Berkeley student Roberta (Bibi) Lee went running with her lover Bradley Page on a Sunday in 1984. He came back alone. When she failed to return police mounted one of the largest missing-person searches in California history. Five weeks later Roberta's battered body was found and within hours, Page had confessed to Roberta's murder—a confession he was later to recant. With its enduring themes of innocence and evil, truth and uncertainty, human motives and emotions, The Dead Girl is a complex exploration of the nature of reality and the frail, shifting and suspect ways in which we respond to it.

Genres: True Crime, Nonfiction, Memoir, Crime, Mystery, Adult, Mystery Thriller

486 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1990

Reviews

[Erika Anderson · Rating 1 out of 5]

While this began with a promising introduction discerning the difference between the stories made up about people who have died and the people themselves, it unraveled into pages upon pages of the author's obsessive and repetitive rants on her fears of her own unworthiness. I am shocked it got such good reviews, in fact. Instead, I see the majority of the book as an example of what not to do--excessive, meaningless dialogue, including all source material without editing it down or commenting on it, etc. I was looking to be comforted by a scathing review and so far have found none. What a disappointment :-)

[SAM · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can think of only four books I have read more than once, The Dead Girl by Melanie Thernstrom is one of them. Ironically my first time with this book was during a stint of jury duty. I had taken it along as a way to pass time between cases but luckily I was only required once so the majority of my time was spent sitting at a table reading, all expenses paid. Such good memories!

The book centres around the murder of Roberta Lee. She went for a run one morning in 1984 with her boyfriend, Bradley Page, and didn't come back. Brad admits to the murder and then renounces his confession. Melanie and Roberta were the closest of friends so what follows is an extremely personal account of the disappearance, the trial and aftermath.

The Dead Girl is full of pain with very little room for happiness. The opening line sets the tone -  "You will never know Roberta. That could not happen now" and continues to plummet you into a story filled with utter despair. I consider the book two stories running parallel to each other; Roberta's murder and everything you'd expect in a true crime story and an almost diary-like narrative from Thernstrom on her struggle to cope with the death of her friend and it's this sorrow-filled confession which makes this book such a masterpiece. You will never read a more honest account of dealing with loss.

There is a passage (from The Dead Girl) I first read in Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel, which she quotes in an attempt to describe her depression:

"It was like sawdust, the unhappiness: it infiltrated everything, everything was a problem, everything made her cry -- school, homework, boyfriends, the future, the lack of future, the uncertainty of future, fear of future, fear in general -- but it was so hard to say exactly what the problem was in the first place.”

If there is a more profound summation of feelings then I've yet to read it and try as she may she is unable to move on with her life. Even after the trial the people surrounding Melanie try their best to continue with life without Roberta but she continues to dwell in her pit of desperation.

Beautifully written, hauntingly personal, make no mistake this is a true crime classic and has every right to be on a top ten list.

[Kris · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars, rounded up.

[Cyndy Aleo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Melanie Thernstrom's The Dead Girl is the debut book every writer dreams of ... only it's not. Thernstrom's best friend was murdered while they were students at Harvard. Based on Thernstrom's senior thesis, The Dead Girl describes the disappearance, search for, and murder of Bibi Lee. Lee's boyfriend initially confessed and recanted, but Thernstrom's retelling of the events is devastating: the initial zeal for the search, the eventual slow-down of interest in the case, and the betrayal felt by friends and family as they realize the murderer was in their midst the entire time.

The emotional connection Thernstrom had to the case is palpable, and you feel the agony even when she takes a standoffish approach to her story. Some critics have said it's even better than Capote's In Cold Blood, but the two can't be compared. Thernstrom was retelling the murder of a friend, and that's something that can't be duplicated.

[Isabeau Kelm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Melanie Thernstrom is undoubtedly a gifted writer, but this book is not about her brutally murdered best friend Bibi or Roberta, an intelligent, beautiful Berkeley student.

Thernstrom appears to be a whiny, self-centered, incredibly privileged young woman who ponders endlessly over her first world problems. While reading I often asked myself: What have her self-doubts, despite constant reassurances from her perfect boyfriend and many, many friends, have to do with Bibi? Granted, some of the reasons of her depressive state could be directly linked to her friend's murder. But only some of them.

This is not a true crime story. This is young Melanie Thernstrom's memoir.

[Grady Hendrix · Rating 3 out of 5]

It feels like reading the script of an undergraduate's one-person show, but somewhere in the cloud of me! me! me! it also achieves moments of real passion and makes you think about the way victims often get erased from the true crime narrative. I don't know, I'll have to think about it over some cheap beer I'm buying with my fake student ID.

[Christy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Picked this up from a pile of free books at the hospital & was hoping to read about Bibi. But it was all Mels, Mels, Mels. Turns out even Bibi's letters were written by the author. The photos earned it a star though!

[Melanie Lloyd · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book which is probably why I suffered through three quarters of it. Don't make that mistake. This book isn't very good. It's repetitive, whiny, and exhausting to read.

[Jack Wolfe · Rating 4 out of 5]

"In Cold Blood" has over 400,000 ratings on Goodreads; "The Executioner's Song" has 16,000; "The Dead Girl" doesn't have 200. Why no love for "The Dead Girl," Goodreads True-Crimers? This is a book that deserves a cult. I mean, the cult is necessarily gonna be kinda small. To be into this book, you have to have a taste for a certain sort of metatextual, obsessive, postmodern English major rambling. The reviewers who criticize Melanie Thernstrom for just talking about herself are not wrong: this is one of the most self-absorbed books I've ever read. But I'd argue that, umm, self-absorption is kind of the point, here. This is a book about memory, and there is a point to all of Thernstorm's forays into literary trickery: they are all efforts to get at the essence of Roberta Lee, the "dead girl" of the book's title. I almost dropped the book when I turned the page and, Jesus Christ, there she was: a person who was once living and who is now dead; a person who was once young and ambitious and cranky like me, and who is now the subject of a book about death. The "work in progress" feel to "The Dead Girl" works because the whole thing still feels unresolved. You don't just "get over" a "loss" like Roberta, not unless you just forget her entirely. There's something curiously alive about this book, and the act of holding it occasionally freaked me out. Harrowing too is how the fate of its murderer hinges on a confession, one that nearly thirty years down the line feels like the sort of coerced statement we good liberal folk are told prosecutors have for years unfairly wrangled from terrified defendants. It's to Thernstrom's credit that she never makes a definitive statement on the killer... That's not the point of the book. The point is to capture Roberta Lee in life and in death. I'm not sure if everything about "The Dead Girl" works but it has a special power that makes it unique even among the more sympathetic true crime books I've read...

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a true crime book written by the victim's best friend. Melanie Thernstrom and Roberta "Bibi" Lee were high school buddies in Cambridge, Mass. Bibi went off to college at Berkeley, and at some point was murdered while jogging with her boyfriend. It's an absorbing and sad story which at times feels self-indulgent - it's as much about Melanie as about Bibi. I think if I read it today, more than 10 years later, I would find it close to unbearable, and bloated by all of Thernstrom's journal-entry style memories, but it was worth reading at the time.

[Fishface · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning, beautifully-written memoir about the murder of the author's best childhood friend. She struggles not only with that loss, but the unanswered questions about her life and death, not to mention the insistence of others that she let go of the memories and move on with her life. Thernstrom makes it possible for people who have never lost someone to violence to understand why that is impossible. Bibi would be so pleased to know that she was this wonderful in someone else's eyes. The book is also very much about the critically-important role in the best friend in any girl's life.

[Sylvie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I gave up on this book at page 105. Couldn't take it anymore. Maybe because it is written from the point of view of the author? There was way too much about herself and her friends. Also, these people who were mostly in their early twenties in 1984 were all so frigging depressed and depressing, so I gave up, not something I usually do.

[Rosanna · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really hate to give it so little stars,but I guess I was expecting more of what happened and the trial over the authors feelings and difficult time she had coaping with the death of her best friend....

I felt like alot of the times (to me) that it was just a constant running of sentences and some of it was confusing as to who was supposed to be talking and make sense of it.

[Lenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

An innocent girl is murdered. Her best friend explains how this brutal act effects her and all the other people who knew her.

[holden]

I basically have whiplash from the book going from "fairly interesting" to "extremely tedious" so frequently.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book the first time when shortly after it was published. I recall the events of Roberta Lee's disappearance followed by the discovery of her murder having been a student at U.C. Berkeley at the time they occurred.
Thernstrom writes about her relationship with Roberta Lee and the horrible tragedy of Lee's death with fluid waves of recall, layering detail after detail.
What I overlooked in my first reading was Thernstrom's whiny insecure badgering of her friends and loved ones to assuage her feelings of fear and self-doubt. (Her boyfriend, Adam, is a saint for putting up with her.) She comes off as incredibly self centered, which probably is her youth coming through. She writes more about herself than about her friend. Oh well, it's her memoir, so I suppose extensive self absorption is understandable, though my patience with it wore thin.

My other realization during the second reading was how Thernstrom appears guarded with and judgmental about other women, including her mother, Veronica, Kim, Lena, etc. (except Roberta, who is dead), and admiring and even worshipful of men, including Adam, Bob, (except Brad, who is a murderer).

[Eileen Granfors · Rating 5 out of 5]

The opening caught me! I read a lot of true crime, but Thernstrom is up to a lot more than most true crime writers tend to use. Delicious so far.

I loved this book. It is a sad story of murder and the life of the victim as well as taking a deep look at the life of the survivors and the perpetrator.

It is also an exploration of coming to terms with life before and after success, before and after teenage angst, before and after momentous, life-altering pain.

Thernstrom is a gifted writer, recreating her friendship with the dead girl, Bibi. Through her words, Thernstrom makes Bibi real to us. While the banter between the friends is often serious, their friendship reflects growing up with expectations. The friction between parental goals for their children and the children's need/right to live their own destinies is explored thoroughly. Melanie's love for Adam, her relationship with Bob, and the central role of Bibi in Mel's sense of self are wondrous to behold.

I know not everyone will love this book as I do. For people with a particular kind of upbringing and college experience, it is a window into that long-past world.

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

I started reading this book before Christmas. Biiiiiiiiiggggg mistake. It is depressing depressing depressing. So I had to take a break and finish it after the holidays.

I loved the first third of the book. "Creative non-fiction" I believe it how David Shields describes it and that's very accurate. Melanie begins by writing about the violent death of a friend, something I have similarly experienced, and she captures that visceral feeling so eloquently and perfectly. Then the book delves more into her friend's killer, the case against him, and his trial. In the middle of the book Melanie wrote about the deep depression and suicidal thoughts she suffered during the trial years.

Because it's a true story, it doesn't have a satisfying ending like you'd want in a crime/thriller. And that was ok with me. But personally I felt the book could've been about a hundred pages shorter. She starts to get more "creative" with her non-fiction and it feels almost like an exercise in a writing class at best and filler at worst.

[Eva-Maria Maggi · Rating 5 out of 5]

A novelist friend of mine recommended this excellent true-crime & coming-of-age memoir because Melanie Thernstrom's non-fiction writing is excellent. Written by a poet, this book is a non-fiction masterpiece that weaves together the murder of her best friend, their young adult depression & love, and the continued hope and suffering of survivors in one beautiful piece of literature. First published in 1990 (!) this book showed for the first time, that true crime writing can capture the reader with beautiful storytelling without the need to be sensational. I think the book was not very successful and is now out of print because Melanie Thernstrom was ahead of her time when she wrote "The Dead Girl". Today, this literary mix of memoir and crime would be more widely read, also because the mental health crisis in young adults is more prevalent and recognized. It is time to republish this book so it can get the recognition it truly deserves.

[Bibi Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. Seen as "true crime," I think it's really come out on top, in a way that wouldn't have been anticipated before that genre was so heavily interrogated by Janet Malcolm and before the trueness of memoir went through so many tests. From the perspective of all that, Thernstrom's early books-- this one, and Halfway Heaven-- come across as breathtakingly honest. She makes no claim (that I recall) to get into the heads of Bibi or her boyfriend of anybody else. She lays complete claim for her own subjectivity. It's a very vivid picture of how the world changes when you are touched by violent crime. At one point she's having yet another conversation with a friend about what all this MEANS and he says something like, "Look, none of that matters; the bottom line is that you won't be seeing your friend again."

[Varonica · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a true story, a terrible story, involving the disappearance of the author's best friend.
The author wanted to publish her friends' letters to her and fill out the story, but the grieving parents would not let her use the actual letters, as they were now part of her estate. Melanie beautifully recaptured the letters, and tells of the harrowing months of searching for her friend.
Okay, my brother also shows up in this book - as a friend who flies across the country to comfort Melanie. It was a sad and tender book with a great pace as we are searching to find out what happened!

[Sharon Maclin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is described as "better than IN COLD BLOOD" and "part memoir, part whodunit". Both descriptions miss the mark. Thernstrom is able to put into words all the thoughts and emotions that one experiences after the sudden, unexpected, and in this case violent, death (murder) of a dear friend or loved one. I speak from experience. At over 400 pages, it's a long read, but in my opinion it's totally worth the time. I have now read all 3 of her books, so it's a given that I like her writing style. I hope she's working on another.

[Katey Hajos · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another book that is misrepresented in its description. It was good, but I was expecting True Crime not a memoir. It got a bit long winded and off on tangents quite a bit. Melanie is an excellent writer though and I will be checking if she has written any fiction.

[Jennifer · Rating 2 out of 5]

"The Dead Girl" of the title is actually a Chinese American girl, but you'd never know that by the cover, which depicts an ethnically ambiguous person.

The image is fitting given that Thernstrom never considers whether the victim's ethnicity played a role in her victimization by her white boyfriend or her inexplicable "depressions." The author sees Bibi Lee's naturally dark hair as symbolic of her "darkness" (a stereotypical and racist assumption that dark hair equals something bad whereas blond hair equals goodness and light) but oddly never lends significance to the fact she was a person of color engaged in a biracial romance that killed her.

Unlike today, where issues of race and class are heavily explored, this book was published back in the early 90s when assimilation was all the rage and if you were Asian (as opposed to Black or Latino), liberal elitists like Thernstorm took the "model minority myth" at face value and assumed that racism toward Asians didn't really exist and therefore racial politics could be safely ignored.

The Asian girl's name, Bibi Lee, lent itself well to this "yellow washing" given its Anglo-Saxon sounding roots. Whatever the case, Thernstorm treats Bibi like an anthropological object through which she can fully exercise all the philosophical and theological concepts she learned at Harvard. Instead of treating her dead "best friend" like a human being, Thernstom turns Bibi into her muse, waxing poetic about her murder and how it resembles fiction, regurgitating the literary trope that "everyone's life is a story," and going into endless abstract discussions that got her high marks in the Ivy League but epitomizes the insular Ivory Tower thinking that gave birth to such brilliant and enduring ideas as the "defund the police" movement.

There is no real reflection here on loss other than one filled with literary pretensions. The author, who wrote this in her 20s, has all the self-absorption of youth and can't wait to show off her erudition and provide the reader with a tantalizing glimpse of a supposedly superior mind.

Yuck and double yuck. In Hitchcock's film "Rope," one of the characters notes that the murder victim went to Harvard. "That might make it justifiable homicide," he jokes.

After reading this book, I'm inclined to agree.

[Becki · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting aspects. .particularly about the mother daughter relationship. Was riveted by her thoughts and process when she lost her Mom. But so much was kind of boring and some of her relatives (Dad) are particularly revolting. Her brushes with celebrities are interesting and she is not full of herself which made it readable.

[Laurie · Rating 3 out of 5]

What do you say about your best friend dying? In Thernstrom's case, quite a lot. She joins the search for her friend, attends her trial and annotates the transcripts of her friend's boyfriend's testimony. By the end of the book (which might be a bit overlong)she has become a little less insecure, deciding to create this memoir of a friendship.

[Lisa Mcbroom · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this to be very cold and detached about writing about the murder of your friend.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

When will Goodreads allow half-stars? 3.5 really. Here's one for those of you who think that a week is entirely too long to wait for the next installment of the Serial podcast. This book relates the life and disappearance and death of Bibi Lee, as experienced by her best friend. It's fascinating because it really delves into the psyches of everyone involved (the author, the victim, the accused), and it blurs the line between nonfiction and imagination, and sharing information and withholding information. Thernstrom puts herself at the center of the story, and she explores the deadening of emotion that so many can experience in the face of tragedy. There are some details that are remarkably similar to the case addressed in Serial -- this book will definitely make the time between Thursdays feel shorter.

Editorially, I would have chopped at least 100 pages, but it was still very readable.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a difficult book to review. I went into expecting more of a True Crime analysis of the murder and trial but since this is written by the "Dead Girl"'s best friend it was more about memory and grief. At times the book was tedious with the author's endless philosophical conversations with friends about appropriate feelings and ethics but other times those same conversations and journal-style entries were compelling and sad. I think it just grew repetitious and a bit long. But the end where she shares her marginalia on the the (1st) trial transcript turns out to be some of the most interesting parts of the book, all about semantics and interpretation since the case is far from clear. Overall the book is very raw and moving about the loss of a friend.

[Laura Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book because a) Elizabeth Wurtzel uses a line from it as an epigraph in Prozac Nation, and at 14 or whenever I read PN, I set out to devour everything her epigraphs came from and b) Paul John Eakin analyzes it in depth in How Our Lives Become Stories, a FASCINATING book about the construction of identity through narrative. And I LOVED it. There is just so much crazy shit going on, with the life imitating art and the tragedy of the death and the ways these girls became how they were and how Melanie dealt with losing her best friend. And she is just a really GOOD writer, and so honest.