Joyce Carol Oates - Blonde

Norma Jean Baker was not Marilyn Monroe--she just played her in the movies. But the fact that she could never make anyone else understand that, least of all her husbands and lovers, aided in pushing a woman of already fragile mental health further to the edge.

This fictionalized biography of America's sex kitten begins when she is six, and continues until her death. Her frightening life with her paranoid schizophrenic mother is chillingly and realistically described, as is the effect of that experience for the rest of her life. Her mother's sense of flexible reality becomes Norma Jean's (in the book spelled Norma Jeane) for better and worse. The camera is as real, if not more so, than the person behind it for her.

As she reaches fame and legendary status, she is further locked into the image she has created, and cannot step away from it at the same time that it becomes harder to inhabit it.

Oates creates a sympathetic woman out of the legend, and tells her story in a shocking realism that is aided, rather than hindered, by the decision not to refer to DiMaggio and Miller by name, but rather The Ex-Athlete and The Playwright, highlighting that to them, and to us, Norma Jeane was merely the Actress, or perhaps, the Sexpot.

The caricature of feminine desirability is given her life back, as terrible as it might be.