Word: thernstrom
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...number of ways, this is as much a book about Thernstrom as about Lee. The Dead Girl is a memorial to a friend, but it is also a ventilation of personal outrage. For Thernstrom, knowing her "characters" also means knowing her conciousness of them. And knowing of her loss...
...Thernstrom, in the story she tells, loses not only a friend, but her notions of justice and retribution. Page eventually beats the murder charge, and is convicted of a lesser charge of manslaughter, free on bail. He still awaits the results of an appeal, while Thernstrom awaits the arrival of a lost friend in her dreams...
Writing the book was obviously a very redemptive act for Thernstrom, and she writes in a courageous voice. But it in the end, it is the tragedy that resonates. As the author writes in the Postscript, "[N]o one can write for another because no one's spirit is like another's. The loss is, as it was, irreparable...
Melanie R. Thernstrom '87 received a fair amount of press during her senior year at Harvard when she was offered the largest advance ever made by the American book industry for a first novel. A number of publishing houses bid for the creative thesis she had written as an English major, an intensely personal work about the disappearance and murder of her childhood friend...
That friend, Roberta Lee, grew up with Thernstrom in the small town of Lexington, Mass. Both literarily inclined children of professors, the two maintained a deeply personal and prolific correspondence when Lee went to college in northern California. In her first year at UC Berkeley, Lee suddenly disappeared. Thernstrom immediately went west to help in the search, to discover, weeks later, that Lee's sexually violated corpse was found buried in a shallow grave. Lee's boyfriend, Bradley Page, who had diligently helped in the search, confessed to the crime...