Jean Harris is notorious as the convicted killer of cardiologist Herman Tarnower, author of the popular Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet. Tarnower, Harris's lover for fourteen years, died March 10, 1980, of four gunshot wounds. Harris, who believed that her lover was leaving her for a younger woman, contended that Tarnower's death accidently resulted from a struggle for the handgun as she attempted to kill herself. Jurists were unconvinced, and, though no evidence exists that Harris planned to kill Tarnower, she was found guilty in 1981 of second-degree murder and sentenced to fifteen years to life at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in New York.

In 1986, Harris published Stranger in Two Worlds, a memoir of her life both before and after her imprisonment. Here Harris recounts her dull existence as a homemaker in Grosse Pointe, an exclusive community near Detroit, Michigan, and her career in education, which included...