Norma Jean: The Story of Marilyn Monroe

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As an avid reader and consumer of content, I am in two minds as to how I feel about biographies. On the one hand, I love them because I get to know someone or someones that I’ll never meet in my lifetime and it’s a fascinating thing to develop relationships with people without them knowing of your existence. And I say ‘someones’ here because in quite a few cases of biographies, at least the most compelling ones, you not only learn about the subject matter, but the author as well. I love this. But at the same time, I dislike them because the genre can oftentimes be a trap, set to lure lazy or unemotive writers and the world can then become flooded with books on the same subject, with many of them being boring or uninspired. A good biography provides a deep and layered reading experience, while a bad one is unengaging and an insult to the subject.

But then on a third hand, there are some biographies that tread the fine line between being good or bad and just end up being interesting, kind of insightful, fine. This is the kind of experience I had this week whilst reading Fred Lawrence Guile’s Norma Jean: The Story of Marilyn Monroe.

Told in six parts, each chronicling a significant chunk of Marilyn’s life and its greatest milestones, the book paints a realistic and identifiable picture of one of Hollywood’s most iconic screen actresses. It’s both a subjective and sympathetic exploration of Marilyn’s character, carefully placing just as much focus on the various people that populated her inner circles as the enigmatic blonde herself.

When it comes to biographies, I do have a fear that they could ruin the subject for me; and of course this is solely dependent on the writing, but it’s still a valid fear. As social creatures with effervescing brains that are constantly fizzing away, we have the luxury in this modern age to form relationships and attachments to people that we’ll never meet, even people from the past. Marilyn is one such love for me and I think what made me take so long in plucking this off my ‘To-Read’ pile was this fear that it might be a bland piggyback ride, using the starlet’s own tragic story as the hook and not putting in any extra work to make the book compelling. I am happy to report that this was not the case. It’s not the emotive outpouring of a gushing fan, rather a sophisticated and often sedated exploration into the phenomenon that was Marilyn Monroe. Underlying the subjective prose is another voice that reads with something like an emotional stream of consciousness: curious, analytical, and mesmerised by the subject. I quite enjoyed this book’s tone and found myself getting through it quite quickly because not only was I fascinated in reading about a person I admire, but getting a sense of the author’s relationship to her as well.

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And I think it’s this thought that has tipped my opinion of biographies back to being favourable because it’s a truly unique experience: the equivalent of being in a fan club, or just genuinely striking up conversation with a stranger about something when you realise you have that thing in common.

Norma Jena: The Story of Marilyn Monroe is an interesting biography that doesn’t necessarily swim with the emotive appreciation of the subject or the reactions to their dramas, but rather plainly talks about it with a calm voice that then develops into something more layered and complicated the more that it talks about the subject.

Author: Fred Lawrence Guiles, 1969

Published: First published in Great Britain by W. H. Allen & Co. Ltd, 1969. This edition published by Mayflower Books Ltd, 1971.