Recently republished with an introduction by David Shields, author of The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead

One Sunday in November 1984, Roberta (Bibi) Lee, a Berkeley student, went running with her boyfriend, Bradley Page, in a state park. Brad came back alone, saying Bibi had run off on her own.

Melanie Thernstrom—Bibi’s closest friend—traces the search for Bibi, the discovery of her body, Brad’s opaque confession and recantation, his trial, and the haunting questions that linger about the case. Praised by literary critics such as Harold Brodkey, Helen Vendler, and Harold Bloom, The Dead Girl draws upon diary excerpts, anecdotes, poems, letters, trial transcripts, and literary theory to create a strikingly original post-modern collage of memory, loss and redemption. With its enduring themes of innocence, evil, and the tangle of human motives, the book is an unforgettable elegy to a dead girl and a complex exploration of the nature of reality and the shifting, suspect ways we use metaphor to try to create a true story.