DON'T FORGET THE GIRL

It’s been twelve years since 18-year-old University of Iowa freshman Abby Hartmann disappeared, and Jon Allan Blue, the serial killer suspected of her murder, is about to be executed. Abby’s best friends, Bree and Chelsea, watch as their friend’s memory is unearthed only to be, once again, overshadowed by Blue and his crimes. The killer is everywhere—on the cover of magazines, debated over in chat rooms, the subject of true crime books, and portrayed in a trending TV series. 

The women, estranged after a disastrous media interview in the wake of Abby’s disappearance and years of unvoiced secrets and resentments, face their own personal struggles. Bree, a college photography professor, is pregnant—and the father is one of her students. Chelsea, an Episcopal priest with a youth following online, struggles to find funding for an LGBTQ+ outreach center in her community, while keeping her romantic past with Abby carefully buried, even from her husband, Daniel. After Abby’s body is found and a high-profile podcast dedicates its next season to Jon Allan Blue’s murders, Bree and Chelsea are drawn together again, forced to face the ways they failed one another and Abby, as they try to find a way forward.

The novel alternates between Bree and Chelsea’s struggles in the present and Abby’s last month alive, hiding her romantic relationship and struggling to be the perfect girl her mother expects her to be. When Abby’s college acting teacher’s behavior becomes increasingly unsettling, pushing her to share parts of herself she most wants to hide, she slowly begins to unravel under the pressure of trying to please everyone but herself.

Don't Forget the Girl is a meditation on female friendship, queer romance, and grief. Loosely inspired by Ted Bundy’s crimes and pop culture’s enduring fascination with him, the novel explores society’s obsession with true crime and its effects on victims’ loved ones 

Rebecca McKanna's fiction has been anthologized in The Best American Mystery Stories 2019 and honored as a distinguished story in The Best American Short Stories 2019. Her work has appeared as one of Narrative Magazine’s Stories of the Week and has been published in Colorado Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, Joyland, Third Coast, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among other publications. She has received financial support from the Sewanee Writers Conference and the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature. An assistant professor of English at the University of Indianapolis, she earned her MFA from Purdue University.