Melanie Thernstrom is an author and contributing writer for
The New York Times Magazine. She is the author of Halfway Heaven: A
Diary of a Harvard Murder, The Pain Chronicle, and The Dead Girl.
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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