Marilyn Monroe: Fragments (2010)
Marilyn Monroe, even after all this time she is still looked at as a brainless bimbo by some people. When you dive a little deeper into her life, you will learn that there is an intelligent and empathic woman who needed to create a mask to keep herself from getting hurt (again and again). It was a mask she didn't drop often, but with Fragments you get a more than decent look at the woman behind the mask.
Especially since it has never been so clear that there are two personalities in one woman. The focus of Fragments lies on Norma Jeane Mortenson (Monroe's real name) and not the carefully crafted image called Marilyn Monroe. The book collects several written documents varying from poems to letters to even recipes. Not everything is that interesting (especially the recipes have no added value, luckily this is only a small portion of the book) but it is clear that the actress is at her most vulnerable in these texts. Her break-up with Arthur Miller, her time in the psychiatric ward, ... It is heavy stuff, but it also showcases her poetic talent. The book is divided in several chapters (each chapter is actually dedicated to a different notebook she used to write in) and they are decorated with pictures of a reading Marilyn on set for example. At the end there is a picture of her library and the eulogy Arthur Miller wrote when she died.
I'm quite sure that this isn't everything that Monroe has written in all those years, but this is still a more than decent collection. Either way, Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment (they are both editor of the book) did their utter best to portray this material in the best way possible. There are high quality scans of the texts, a transcription (with sometimes an addition of a missing letter, they do this in another color than the rest of the text to make clear that they changed something) and an attempt to guide the reader in whatever order you should read the fragments. This order is their own opinion of course but sometimes it is handy to find a little structure in the train of thoughts. They even leave footnotes to explain who certain people were or what the significance of certain names is.
Everyone who wants to have an opinion about Marilyn Monroe should read this. Almost too often she is reduced to a brainless bimbo whose (and more often not even hers) one-liners are shared by teenage girls on social media. Fragments shows a different Marilyn and this is the Marilyn I fell in love with when I first saw her in Some Like It Hot all those years ago.
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