Melanie Thernstrom is an author and contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. The author of Halfway Heaven: A Diary of a Harvard Murder (Doubleday, 1997) and The Pain Chronicle (FS&G 2010). The Dead Girl was her first book. Melanie lives with her husband and two children in Palo Alto, CA.
David Shields is the author of fifteen books, including the New
York Times bestseller The Thing about Life Is That One Day You'll
Be Dead; Reality Hunger, named one of the best books of 2010 by
more than thirty publications; and Black Planet, a finalist for the
National Book Critics Circle Award. His work has been translated
into twenty languages. He lives in Seattle, WA.
"I like this book better than In Cold Blood. It is more honest, more credible, more frightening, and more instructive." - Harold Brodkey
"...haven't put it down since I bought it; it's a haunting and
brutal examination of friendship, love, and death that totally
upends and redefines the idea of nonfiction." --Bookriot THE
DEAD GIRL is a unique story--powerfully moving, stark, tender and a
wonderful read." --Mary Higgins Clark "Lovely and compelling. . .
An impressive debut and a strong stirring memoir of a friend . . .
reminds us what a thin edge we are on, and therefore of how
astonishing it is to be alive." --Anne Lamott, Mademoiselle "THE
DEAD GIRL builds with such graceful momentum that it reads like
water flowing. . . the story of a friendship, after the fact,
incapable of escaping it. . . hinting, again and again, that for
one to have left the other, is a terrible betrayal, a broken
promise, of some blood-sister pact made at the age of ten." --Greil
Marcus "An extraordinary book. . . exquisitely written meditations.
Melanie Thernstrom inhabits her book in an entirely original voice,
struggling to make sense not only of what happened, but of how to
tell it. You will feel changed by hearing her voice and carry it
around for a long time." --Louise Bernikow, Cosmopolitan "In the
tangle of Thernstrom's unflinchingly honest narrative is a
profoundly unsettling portrait of privilege punctuated by despair."
--People Magazine
"A vastly gifted writer"--Kirkus "A powerful exhaustive memoir of
the writer's grief and recovery" --New York Magazine "Raises
important questions about the nature of reality" --San Francisco
Examiner-Chronicle "What a dark, magical book! THE DEAD GIRL reads
like the most convincing of fairy tales, one where childish fears
give way to the grimmest of adult realities. Part memoir, part
whodunit, this is a passionately self-examined account of a lost
friend and the effect of that loss. In its vaulting ambition and
its fierce, unironic wish to create meaning, this book is a welcome
departure from much of contemporary writing."--Daphne Merkin,
Washington Post Book World "A powerful moving book. . . THE DEAD
GIRL is a testament to the magnetic power of her death, and
Thernstrom's exceptional sensitivity qualifies her as an ideal
guide through the darkness" --Daniel Max, The New Republic "An
astonishingly delicate and sensitive memorial to a lost friend. . .
the struggle of two privileged young women trying to find a place
in the chaotic world of the mid 1980's." --The Boston Globe
"Thernstrom is such a good writer, you'll follow her almost
anywhere. . . a great many funny, sad, wise and compelling things
about life are said in this book. . . It seems to validate one of
the tenets of her friendship with Roberta, a theme expressed
repeatedly in the book, that there is no sensibility so sharp and
true as an adolescent's and so powerless against the grown-up
world." --Cleveland Plain Dealer "Raw honest and disturbing--not
just because of the violence at its center, but for the facts about
a particular all-too-common young womanhood, pressured to please,
pressured to succeed and clouded by self-doubt and fear." --Self "A
fiercely honest and lyrical account. . .Thernstrom shows us a new
generation, poised on the brink of adulthood, that knows the
crucial difference between self-awareness and self-absorption."
--Pearl K. Bell "Imaginative, complex and impassioned, THE DEAD
GIRL is as much about growing up as it is about murder, as much
about life--the life of young people today--as it is about death."
--Linda Wolfe, author of The Preppie Murder "A truly remarkable
exercise in insight and objectivity: the day to day concerns, joys
and woes of this group of privileged young Americans are chronicled
in this fierce light of tragedy and horror without a single false
note being sounded." --Conor Cruise O'Brien
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