Brilliant Beginning or a Bitter Betrayal? : Books: Melanie Thernstrom angered a family with her intimate work about her murdered best friend.

Bibi and Melanie were friends. They lived near each other in Lexington, Mass. They drove their mothers crazy--every teen-age girl’s mission. They talked about boys, and later, about men. They wrote poems.

Bibi went to Berkeley. Melanie went to Harvard. They wrote letters. Then, Bibi was murdered. Melanie, moved by grief, wrote a book.

“Mistakes of Metaphor,” Melanie Thernstrom’s reflections about 21-year-old Roberta Lee, known to friends as Bibi, and how in 1985 she was beaten to death by her boyfriend, helped Thernstrom graduate summa cum laude, Harvard’s highest honor.

Retitled “The Dead Girl,” a phrase from the book, Thernstrom’s dissertation sold in 1987 at a spirited, three-day auction to Pocket Books hardcover. The price was too high for Thernstrom, then 23, to fully grasp.

“Dad, I sold my book--for $37,500,” she told her father in an excited telephone call.

“No, Melanie,” she heard her agent correct her from the background. “It’s $375,000.”

The big advance thrust Thernstrom into a small and celebrated circle of hot young writers. The heavy expectations of Pocket Books, which publishes the 431-page, $19.95 hardcover this week, are reflected in a 60,000-copy first-run printing and in a best-seller bonus clause that was negotiated into Thernstrom’s contract three years ago.

But Thernstrom’s literary good fortune had a personal cost. Charging betrayal, the Lee family expressed anger at Thernstrom’s portrayal of Roberta. When Thernstrom asked for permission to reproduce Roberta’s letters in her book, the Lee family refused through their lawyer. They no longer speak to Roberta’s best friend from high school. They decline all inquiries about the matter.

“I don’t think they felt in all respects that it was accurate,” said Molly Sherden, the Lees’ lawyer.

Thernstrom, now 26 and a writing instructor at Cornell, said the Lees’ reaction makes her feel “queer and queasy and stuff.”

She said she thought that writing the book was “a good thing. I thought it was something I could do for Roberta,” she said. “There’s not much you can do for the dead.”

When the book earned such a strong response from publishers, “I thought everyone would be happy for me,” Thernstrom said. It was “very hard” to learn about the Lees’ negative feelings, but “I have to grant them those feelings.”

In any case, said Thernstrom, “My primary loyalty is to Roberta. I’m not a friend of the family. I’m a friend of Roberta.”

Thernstrom, who has kept a diary since she was 5, said she began to write about Roberta as a catharsis. “I was in mourning,” she said. “I was very depressed.”

As her senior thesis, the project was seen only by her thesis adviser, and later, by members of the English department. It was, Thernstrom maintains, a very private document.

“It was my thesis,” she said. “I wasn’t even planning to show it to my parents.”

Even when Michael Blumenthal, head of Harvard’s creative writing program, took Thernstrom’s thesis to his literary agents, “I thought it was more like a diary than an academic document” or a book that would sell to the public, Thernstrom said.

But the enthusiasm of the agents, Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu, was contagious. Thernstrom began to “like the idea of people reading about Roberta,” knowing her, and knowing about such elements of her life as Marcellus, Roberta’s teddy bear.

Thernstrom’s book examines her friendship with Bibi, and probes what she calls “the interior lives of young women.” Since Thernstrom is as much a character in the book as Roberta Lee, it offers intimacies about her own life as well.

“That’s when I start feeling a little sick,” Thernstrom said. “There are moments when you can’t remember why you wanted strangers to know how depressed you were when you were 21, all the problems you had with your parents, how your boyfriend left you.”

But the book focuses also on how Roberta Lee was killed. It was Nov. 4, 1984, and Lee had gone jogging in the Oakland hills with her boyfriend, Bradley Nelson Page, and with another friend. Lee was impetuous, and on this day, she was angry at Page for having dated someone else. She ran off on her own, down a different path than Page and their friend.

Page went off to look for her, but reported to their friend that he couldn’t find her. Page and the friend left the park.

Thernstrom continued to write in her diary while she took part in the five-week search for Bibi Lee. Her closeness to the Lees during this time later prompted a Lee family friend, Harry Mairson, to charge that Thernstrom had “posed as friend and exploited as writer.” Thernstrom said she was merely keeping her diary, on which “The Dead Girl” is largely based.

Roberta Lee’s body was found five weeks later in the park where she had gone jogging. Page first confessed, then recanted. His first trial on murder charges resulted in a hung jury. In a second trial, he was convicted of manslaughter. Page remains free on appeal.

Thernstrom’s coverage of the second trial, along with her ruminations about it, are included in “The Dead Girl.” So are pictures of Roberta Lee, several of them taken by Lee’s friend from Berkeley, Fred Carruth. Carruth said he had not known that his photographs were in the book until he received a call from Roberta Lee’s sister, Gloria.

Some of the postcards and little drawings that Lee used to send to Thernstrom also are reproduced in “The Dead Girl.” But in a brief postscript, Thernstrom explains that the letters throughout the book that are signed by Lee are really Thernstrom’s own inventions. Copyright law gives the Lees possession of their late child’s letters. And the Lees, wrote Thernstrom, “have denied permission to reproduce or quote from any of them.”

Thernstrom said she gave the Lees a copy of the manuscript soon after she sold the book, but “I never heard back.”

Their lack of response “felt horrible,” Thernstrom said. “I was incredibly sad.”

Then, obviously tired of the topic, Thernstrom contends that, “There is no controversy with the Lees. It’s just a pity.”

The financial cushion provided by “The Dead Girl” has enabled Thernstrom to follow through on her life’s dream of becoming a writer “without selling out.” Here in this village near Ithaca, in the two-room apartment she shares with a rabbit named Sugarplum, Thernstrom is at work on a novel, “The Possibility of Home.”

Thernstrom displays no visible trappings of the high-priced author. Model-thin, with an angular face and a mane of dark hair, she dresses in leggings and a T-shirt from a wardrobe she calls “very sweater intensive.” She heats her small home with a wood-burning stove, and types on the hand-me-down computer she inherited from her mother.

After “The Dead Girl,” Thernstrom said she would “never spend a year writing about a murder” again. If it hadn’t happened to have involved her friend, “I would never have chosen that as my subject.” In the future, said Thernstrom, “I want to write about happy things.” She brightened. “Like everyone else.”