The Dead Girl

Roberta Lee, a Berkeley student of unusual promise, went running one Sunday in November 1984 with her lover, Bradley Page. He came back alone. Roberta, sometimes volatile and moody, had run off on her own, he said. When she failed to return, one of the largest missing-person searches in California history was launched. Five weeks later, her battered body was found on a bed of branches in a shallow grave. Within hours, Page had confessed to the murder of Roberta Lee—and then recanted. The story of the dead girl had begun.

Melanie Thernstrom, a brilliant writer and poet, was Roberta’s closest friend. In this haunting, multi-layered memoir, originally published in 1990, she has written a heart-breaking tribute, both elegy and celebration, to her lost friend. With unflinching honesty and infinite grace, Thernstrom attempts to make sense of a death fundamentally nonsensical: weaving together news clippings and old photographs, Roberta’s letters and her own recollections, she reconstructs the horrific crime, the agonizing search for the body, the trial and its wrenching, explosive climax.

Through the filter of memory, Roberta herself—gifted, fiercely intelligent, yearning for love—is rendered achingly alive, and Thernstrom offers a powerful and deeply personal account of grief, as well as a raw-nerved portrait of a generation for whom the future is uncertain and threatening.

With its enduring themes of innocence and evil, truth and uncertainty, tangled human motives and feelings, The Dead Girl is a complex exploration of the nature of reality and the frail, shifting, suspect ways in which we respond to it. In her stubborn refusal to let her dead friend be forgotten, Melanie Thernstrom has created a superb collage of memory, loss, and redemption.