SOURCE: “The Headmistress and the Diet Doctor,” in Washington Post Book World, October 25, 1981, p. 3.

In the following review, Yardley finds Mrs. Harris, and the murder case upon which it was based, shallow and worth neither writing nor reading about.

Diana Trilling has written a long, occasionally insightful and frequently soporific book [Mrs. Harris] about Jean Harris, the schoolmarm who killed Herman Tarnower, the diet doctor. The book is loaded with admirably serious notions, but it fails to establish its central premise: that Jean Harris and “Hi” Tarnower are sufficiently interesting people to warrant such laborious scrutiny. Trilling struggles mightily to give weight to them and their strange case, but ends up proving mainly that you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

She was drawn to the case, Trilling writes, because “I'm fascinated by the kind of world that Dr. Tarnower and Mrs. Harris inhabited...