Dear Debbie
49 pages • 1-hour read
Freida McFaddenDear Debbie
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Chapter 56-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section contains discussion of graphic violence, sexual assault, sexual harassment, substance dependency, and a reference to death by suicide.
Chapter 56 Summary: “Debbie”
A college student named Lennox gives Debbie a tour of the Zeta Pi fraternity house after she claims to be writing an article about Greek life. When she questions him about loyalty within the fraternity, Lennox insists that the fraternity is responsible for the behavior of individual members. Debbie wonders whether Hutch’s fraternity brothers knew about her rape. She leaves her purse in one of the bedrooms to have an excuse to return and try to start a fire to burn down the fraternity house.
Chapter 57 Summary: “Cooper”
Cooper realizes with horror that Debbie was at his boss Ken Bryant’s house the night before Ken left for his last-minute fishing trip. He drives to Ken’s house and breaks in using a hidden key. He is surprised to find Ken’s cell phone on the couch, knowing that Ken would never be without his phone. Cooper becomes increasingly convinced that Debbie is involved in Ken’s disappearance. He decides to search the rest of the apartment before leaving, beginning with the upstairs.
Chapter 58 Summary: “Debbie”
While touring the basement of the Zeta Pi house, Debbie notices a large sign warning party-goers not to leave their drinks unattended. Lennox describes the measures Zeta Pi takes to ensure that no one is able to drug or take advantage of drunk guests at their parties. When Debbie questions whether they can fully stop sexual assault, Lennox insists that he would kick out any member who was accused of assault. Before leaving, Debbie returns upstairs to retrieve her purse.
Chapter 59 Summary: “Cooper”
After finding nothing in the first three rooms of Ken Bryant’s house, Cooper discovers his boss dead in his bed with a bullet wound in his forehead. Cooper panics, suspecting that Debbie stole his gun and used it to kill Ken. Given Ken’s position in bed, Cooper rejects his original theory that Debbie confronted Ken about firing Cooper, then shot him in anger. He begins to worry that she had entirely different motivations, and decides to return home and search his garage for his gun.
Chapter 60 Summary: “Debbie”
Debbie restarts her phone, which she shut down before entering the MIT campus. She receives several apologetic messages from Cooper, which she ignores. She drives home, confident that she has only one thing left to do before healing from the trauma of her assault.
She receives a call from Harley with an invitation to come to dinner and agrees, despite now feeling like Harley has betrayed her. She checks her glove compartment for the gun she has been carrying, implied to be stolen, and reflects that it will soon be used as evidence.
Chapter 61 Summary: “Cooper”
Cooper frantically wipes down every surface in Ken’s house, desperate to erase any evidence that he was there. He spends extra time wiping down Ken’s phone, but is not confident that he erased all his fingerprints. He debates whether to leave via the front or back door, and decides the front door is less suspicious. As he leaves, he sees a video camera hidden above the front door. He briefly panics, then realizes that the camera will likely exonerate him from the murder.
Chapter 62 Summary: “Harley”
Harley cooks dinner in preparation for her ambush of Debbie and Cooper. Although she feels bad about hurting Debbie’s feelings, she is confident that revealing her affair with Cooper is the right thing to do. Cooper has told her that he is not in love with Debbie, and that they haven’t had sex in years. Harley hopes that Debbie will try to fight her, rather than cry. She confirms that Cooper is also planning to come to dinner, and waits anxiously for their arrival.
Chapter 63 Summary: “Cooper”
Cooper arrives home to find his daughters comforting each other on the couch. He realizes that they would both be devastated to lose their mother. He finds his gun safe empty, and theorizes that Debbie stole the gun and used it to kill Ken, hoping to frame Cooper for the death as punishment for an unidentified betrayal. He determines to go out and find her, saying an emotional goodbye to his daughters and promising them that everything will be okay.
Chapter 64 Summary: “Harley
When Debbie arrives, Harley announces that she has invited another guest to dinner: Her boyfriend, whom she does not name. She describes her boyfriend in terms designed to signal to Debbie that Cooper is her boyfriend, hoping to instigate a fight. Debbie does not react, although she does judge Harley for dating a married man, insisting that the man is likely lying about the nature of his relationship. When Cooper arrives, Debbie greets him by the name Jesse.
Chapter 65 Summary: “Cooper”
Cooper decides to search for Debbie at another recent location, an address he does not recognize. On the way, he receives a call from his sponsor, a woman named Cherese. It is revealed that Cooper is fighting alcohol dependency, a fact he has kept a secret from Debbie for the entirety of their marriage, and that Cherese is the woman he has been hiding calls from. Cooper had been maintaining his sobriety, but relapsed after he was fired, and Cherese has called every day since. Cooper decides to tell Debbie the truth and help her out of whatever trouble she has created.
Chapter 66 Summary: “Debbie”
It is revealed that the man Harley has been dating is not Cooper, but Jesse, a fact Debbie realized when she smelled his shirt in Harley’s apartment. Debbie recognized Jesse’s smell because Jesse is also Hutch, the man who raped Debbie in college. Debbie instantly recognized Jesse when he began working with Cooper and developed a plan for revenge. It is revealed that Debbie stole Jesse’s gun and used it to kill Ken Bryant. She drugs Jesse and kills Harley using his gun.
Chapter 67 Summary: “Cooper”
Cooper arrives at Debbie’s last known location on Findly and begins searching frantically for her car. He sees a car he believes is hers but cannot remember her license plate number.
After spotting some of her belongings in the car, he rushes to the closest house and begins banging on the door. He shouts for Debbie, begging her to forgive him and insisting that he loves her.
Chapter 68 Summary: “Debbie”
Debbie attempts to stage Jesse’s death as a death by suicide, hoping to convince police and the coroner that he killed Harley and then himself. She struggles with being in close proximity to Jesse despite knowing that he is drugged and cannot hurt her.
As she is about to pull the trigger, Debbie hears Cooper calling her name. She realizes that he must have found her location on Findly and feels grateful to have a husband who loves her. Feeling trapped, she uses Jesse’s finger to pull the trigger.
Chapter 69 Summary
Debbie leaves Harley’s apartment, having decided not to kill Jesse and to fire the gun into the ceiling. Cooper apologizes profusely and admits that he struggles with alcohol dependency. He reveals that he has been sneaking off to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and hiding calls from his sponsors since they were in college.
Shocked by his admission, Debbie reveals that she dropped out of college because she was raped. Cooper asks Debbie if she used his gun to kill Ken Bryant. Debbie swears she did not, but admits that she did get rid of Cooper’s gun because she doesn’t want one in their house.
Epilogue Summary
The Epilogue is divided into three sections narrated by Cooper, Jesse, and Debbie. One year after the events of the novel, Cooper has started his own accounting firm, and Debbie has launched a successful app. They attend weekly couples counseling to work on honesty in their relationship, and Cooper is confident they can rebuild trust.
In prison, Jesse is killed by other incarcerated men who learn about his history of sexual assault. It is implied that Jesse killed a girl who threatened to report him to the police for raping her.
As she works to rebuild her marriage, Debbie holds one last secret: Ken Bryant was the husband whose wife left him because of a Dear Debbie letter. After befriending Cindy and learning the truth, Debbie decided to kill Kevin and frame Jesse. She determines never to let a man take advantage of her again.
Chapter 56-Epilogue Analysis
In the final section of Dear Debbie, author Frieda McFadden builds tension using her signature technique of short chapters told from competing perspectives. Each of the chapters in this section has a different narrator than the chapter before it, with the exception of the final chapter. Since each chapter is only a few pages long, the result is a whiplash effect that destabilizes the reading experience. This structure also allows McFadden to utilize cliffhangers in nearly every chapter, with these cliffhangers often interacting in significant ways. Chapter 59, for example, ends as Debbie “[climbs] the stairs to the second floor” (261) of the fraternity house, leaving the reader unsure whether or not she will go through with her plan to burn it down. The next chapter begins as Cooper “[climbs] the stairs to the second floor” (262) of Ken Bryant’s house. The repetition of this phrase heightens the tension of Chapter 59’s cliffhanger.
The cycle repeats with Chapters 60 and 61. Chapter 60 ends with Cooper driving frantically to his home to see if his gun is in his gun safe or if Debbie has stolen it. The following chapter ends with the revelation that the gun Debbie is using is stolen, pointing the reader back to Cooper’s fear in the previous chapter and forward to the next chapter, in which Cooper might confirm his fears. However, the next chapter does not resolve the issue of the gun, ending instead with Cooper realizing that there is a camera above Jesse’s door, which starts a new series of cliffhangers. These formal techniques allow McFadden to build tension and momentum quickly in the novel’s final chapters.
The novel has an ambiguous ending, which suggests that, although Debbie has experienced some emotional growth as a result of the events of the novel, her dark side remains firmly in place. Debbie ultimately decides not to burn down the Zeta Pi house, suggesting that she is no longer actively seeking vengeance for her sexual assault and that she is beginning to rebuild trust after dealing with The Lasting Effects of Traumatic Events. Debbie realizes that burning down the fraternity house would not punish Hutch, but rather the current fraternity brothers, and that “it wasn’t their fault what happened all those years ago. It wasn’t fair to blame them” (291) This reasoning suggests that Debbie is no longer acting purely on impulse and emotion, but thinking rationally about the consequences of her actions. The fact that she describes fraternity president Lennox as a “nice kid” (291) and accepts that he has “solid rules in place” (260) to protect women at parties suggests that she is also learning to trust men again. Debbie’s decision not to burn down the fraternity house implies that she has grown emotionally by the end of the novel.
Debbie’s emotional growth is also signaled by her renewed interest in the Dear Debbie letters. Losing her column was a major catalyst for Debbie’s escalating violence, and the novel is punctuated by discarded letter drafts in which Debbie encourages violent retaliation against men, suggesting that Debbie has long been particularly incensed by Misogyny and Societal Control of Women’s Bodies. The fact that she returns to the letters at the end of the novel suggests that she is returning to a more stable emotional state. As a result of her therapy, Debbie has revisited the discarded drafts and “rewrote her advice” (305) in order to help the letter writers. The fact that Debbie has reoriented her responses to these letters reflects her emotional growth and implies that she is learning to channel her old feelings of anger into more productive channels.
However, there are also signs that Debbie’s dark side is still present, despite this emotional growth. Debbie is heartless in killing Harley, and attempts to justify the murder by explaining that Harley was “a terrible person” (289) who “destroyed countless marriages without any remorse” (289). Regardless of Harley’s behavior, Debbie’s description of her death as “no big loss” (289) suggests that Debbie remains somewhat callous towards the suffering of others.
In the novel’s final pages, it is revealed that Debbie targeted Ken Bryant not because he fired Cooper, but in defense of his wife, Cindy, whom he financially abused. The novel ends with the threat of future violence if necessary: Debbie warns that, “Cindy and I will look out for each other” (314) and that, “nobody will take advantage of me ever again” (314). The fact that these are the novel’s final lines suggests that Debbie has not fully changed and that she may commit violence again in the future if she feels threatened.
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