I don’t know if I can explain this without sounding odd, but I recently presented a class celebrating Marilyn Monroe’s 100th birthday and after I finished all the research and after the class was over, even though I think the class went pretty well I just felt so despondent over her life and how she’s misinterpreted by different biographers, depending on who’s writing about her…

 Like Norman Mailer’s work on her is just dreadful…not all male biographers of course but a good amount of them tend to treat her as an object or possession instead of a human being. I called my class Marilyn Monroe at 100: icon, intellectual and influencer, but later I worried that I saw things that aren’t there. 

I believe firmly that she loved to read and was much smarter than she came across and yet some biographies treat her with such a one track mind. 

A couple hours after my class was over I discovered a book that I never saw when I was doing my research. It’s called The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe by Sarah Churchwell. I feel like she might be addressing this in her book:

The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe

Monroe

Sarah Churchwell

Kindle Highlights 

It is not just the case that biographies of Marilyn Monroe disagree about the answers to charged questions about her life, her character and her experiences. They often do not acknowledge that other versions even exist.

(Location 69)

Marilyn has gone from sex symbol to a symbol of mourning, from a promise of the liberation of sex to a cautionary tale about the dangers of loneliness and spinsterhood.

(Location 90)

Churchwell dedicates a large portion of it to tearing apart biographers like Norman Mailer, arguing that they projected their own fantasies onto her rather than treating her as a thinking human being. She calls out how Mailer, in particular, mythologized her to fit his own narrative of American masculinity and victimhood.

Reading about how she was distorted can feel almost as violating as reading about the distortion itself. It's a heavy read because it forces you to confront just how cruel the industry and the media were to her intelligence. 

She spent her whole life trying to show people that side of her, and she was often laughed at for it. 

I still have more to say...

The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is one of those books I would hug to my heart if I still read print copies, but I feel no less strongly about it just because it's through my Kindle.It's one of those titles that hits hard because even if it doesn't exactly reflect your life experiences it echoes them enough to hurt pretty, pretty hard.

This passage, for instance:

Such generosity, such thoughtfulness. Carolyn was my friend. 

Yet I loved Ginny. 

At the time I was unable to recognize the nature of my feelings. I’d had schoolgirl crushes on other young women, yet I was struck quickly and suddenly with what amounted to true love when it came to Ginny. I loved the sound of her voice, the curve of her mouth, her long monologues at night while she brushed her hair and she told me about a book she’d read or a painting she’d seen. This might be why she has lingered in my thoughts for so long: because she was my first love. It was a one-sided, silent love, and yet it was true. 

This might also be why I sometimes feel I understand Edgar’s grief better than Carolyn ever did. Both of us were left brokenhearted and bereft.

And there is another passage that is so eerily similar it feels like sharing the passage would be almost the same as sharing something way too private about myself or the person it reminds me of so much. I've been experiencing a lot of emotional things this month so this read is packing an extra wallop of feelings and mental time travel.

(later):

Oh my gosh!...I've gotten much further into The Bewitching and I feel strongly that I should list a trigger warning about incest (in a different subplot than the above)...to me this is no longer the beautiful, special book I started out reading. I've got stop getting excited about books until I've actually finished them.

 

It has hit me surprisingly hard how much I already miss the show The Way Home..the last time I was saddened by a program ending before its time was when Fringe left the air in 2013. (Actually I still haven't quite gotten over Fringe being canceled). 

Ever since I read Hanging Out With Cici by Francine Pascal in middle school I've thought how neat and even helpful it would be for someone to be able to go back in time and meet their mom when she was younger. Very few women I know don't have complicated relationships with their mother, no matter how much love may be there. 

Besides my being a huge scifi-time travel geek, that complication is a huge part of why I adored The Way Home so much...and was thrilled that my mom watched it with me, in another state, with us calling each other during commercials.

 

as seen on ebay

I've loved Marilyn Monroe films for as long as I can remember and the more I read about her the more I like what I read:

“Marilyn loved animals; she was drawn to all living things. She would spend hundreds of dollars to try to save a storm damaged tree, and would mourn its death. She welcome birds, providing treehouses in food for the many species that lived in her lawn; she worried about them and bad weather. She was worried about dogs and cats. She once had a dog that was by nature contemplative, but she was convinced he was depressed. She did her best to make him play, and that depressed him even more; on the rare occasions when he did an antic pirouette, Marilyn would kiss him and hug him, delirious with joy”- Norman Rosten (poet and friend of Marilyn)

What on earth does it mean when your comfort show used to be Golden Girls and now it's Dexter? Does it mean there's something wrong with me that I'm on my fourth re-watch of Dexter in five years and I'm just as captivated and invested as ever.

But it's not the dark moments that haunt me as much as ones like this scene, where Dexter struggles with understanding human connections: