PHOTOGRAPHS: AGATA POSPIESZYNSKA, GETTY IMAGES, © 2000 MARK SHAW/MPTVIMAGES, MAGGI HAMBLING, DEE NICKERSON, SARAH BADDON PRICE, KATE BOXERWRITTEN FOR THE STARS
Marilyn Monroe was often cast in her films as a stereotypical ‘dumb blonde’, but behind the
scenes she was an avid reader, amassing a library of more than 400 volumes – including
titles such as Joyce’s Ulysses and Camus’s The Fall – which she annotated by hand. ‘Books
and movies have been intersecting in significant ways since the silent era,’ writes
the photo archivist Steven Rea in The Hollywood Book Club. His collection of
nearly 60 rare photographs shows Monroe and her fellow screen luminaries
revelling in the joy of reading, from Grace Kelly absorbed in a biography of Louis
Armstrong to Audrey Hepburn devouring Shaw and Shakespeare. MH
‘The Hollywood Book Club’ by Steven Rea (£11.99, Chronicle Books) is published
on 10 September.THE POW ER
OF T HR E E
FICTION
In her new novel, Jessie Burton
explores the tangled
lives of a trio of womenTALK ING POINTS
BOOKS
Left: Marilyn Monroe
in about 1951. Below:
Audrey Hepburn in 1954been expecting hasn’t come. When I saw that triangle of women in
the café, I knew I wanted to write about them, to imagine their desires
and fears. That idea became my new novel, The Confession.
The book has two settings: 1980s Los Angeles and contempo-
rary London, the latter featuring several scenes in cafés just like that
one. Hollywood gave me a space to play with ideas of performance,
glamour, power and danger, while London
in the 2010s was a world I knew well. At the
heart of the book are three women who are
flawed, who have messed up, who don’t
win everything, but still pick up life’s prizes
along the way. Rose is a sort of every-
woman, adrift in London, desperate for
change but uncertain how to enact it, on
the hunt for her missing mother, who
she believes will give her the answers she
has needed for so long. In LA, Elise is one
of the world’s urchins, needy but defensive,
dreaming up perfect futures and running
from them when they don’t go according
to plan. Connecting them both across the
decades is the majestic Connie Holden, a writer who is in her late
thirties when the novel begins and 73 by the time it ends. She is the
only one of the characters who understands that if you want to have
it all, you must live in a fantasy world – and who can do that for ever?
I have dedicated the novel to my female friends, because I am
proud of them all for who they have become, but I have also written
i t f o r a l l w o m e n , m y s m a l l o f f e r i n g t o s h ow t h a t n o n e o f u s a r e a l o n e.
We all have desires to be free, to change the story, to run away, to
want more than one go at life. But it’s not always possible, and that’s
OK. It’s what you do with the story you have that counts.
‘The Confession’ by Jessie Burton (£16.99, Picador) is published
on 19 September.A
Grace Kelly
in 1956few years ago, I was sitting in a stylish London café – you
know the type: airy, Scandinavian design, everyone iso-
lated yet sitting close together. I was recently single and
my outlook on life had changed: I felt I could do any-
thing, go anywhere, be anyone. My twenties were far behind me and
I wasn’t a girl anymore; I was financially independent, and change
was in the air.
To my right was a woman of about my age in a beautiful paisley
dress, typing away at her keyboard. She was alone, and happily so;
more invested in whatever world she was dreaming up inside her
laptop than the one around her. In the corner, a pair of women
slightly older than me sat together at their own table. They were
clearly friends, and the energy between them was easy and familiar.
O n l y o n e t h i n g s e e m e d t o d i f f e r e n t i a t e t h e m f r o m e a c h o t h e r : o n t h e
lap of one sat a baby, probably about six months old. The woman
carrying him clasped her hands round his tiny ribs with ease, but
there was exhaustion in her slight slouch,
in the way she pushed her hair behind her
e a r. He r b o dy, h av i n g g i ve n l i fe to h i s , wa s
not quite as comfortable as that of her
friend, who leant forward, talking animat-
edly, her hands free against the air.
Something strange happened in the
café that day. It was as if those three
women symbolised everything that was
wonderful about the choices we have, and
everything we stand to lose by having to
make a choice in the first place. I could see
the various paths ahead of me laid out –
motherhood, work, creativity, friendship
- and not only did I not know where any of
them would lead, I wasn’t even sure whether they would all be pos-
sible. The women were strangers, and yet they weren’t. I sensed a
sort of symbiosis between them, my own female friends and me.
The mid to late thirties are a strange time. My friends have had
babies, or failed to have them. They’ve moved country, fallen in love,
got divorced, lost parents, changed careers. Life has begun to feel
more ours and at the same time, in the age of social media, more frag-
mented and full of unrealised potential. The sense of arrival we’ve