Vanities / Books
Long before celebrities could “break the
internet” with bare behinds and pregnancy
announcements, Marilyn Monroe laid
the groundwork for viral stardom with that
photo: the bombshell perched atop a
subway grate, dress billowing up around her
shoulders. Though often remembered as
candid, it’s actually a highly choreographed
lm still; a glossy, happy image of a woman
the world would soon learn was unraveling.
Twenty years ago, Joyce Carol Oates peeled
back that polished veneer with Blonde,
the ve-time Pulitzer nominee’s ctional
account of Monroe’s experiences and
interior life. The book oered insatiably
curious fans a seductive premise: a gritty
account of what might have been, rendered
in sharp celluloid clarity.
Now, for its 20 th anniversary, Blonde comes
roaring back with a reissue by Ecco and a
Brad Pitt–produced Netix lm starring Ana
de Armas as Monroe. “Readers of Blonde
today will recognize [the] Hollywood moguls
whose years of molestation, harassment,
abuse, and sexual assault of aspiring actresses
were brought to light in 2017 ,” writes critic
Elaine Showalter in a new introduction.
“Blonde now looks more realistic, and its
feminist fury stands justied.”
When Blonde was published in 2000 , it
was met with the kind of divisive literary
fervor that now plays out most aggressively
in 280 - character tirades. Some critics felt
the subject had been dissected enough in
biographies (by Gloria Steinem and Norman
Mailer), memoir (Monroe’s sister), and
countless lms, while Michiko Kakutani, for
the New York Times, eviscerated the book’s
blending of fact and ction, which she called
“playing to readers’ voyeuristic interest
in a real-life story while using the liberties
of a novel to tart up the facts.” But others
described Blonde as “scary and rhapsodic”
and “epic and impressionistic,” and it went
on to garner nominations for the National
Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize that year.
In recent years, controversy has followed
Oates to Twitter, which the 81 - year-old
has taken to with her characteristic prolicity.
She’s drawn sharp criticism for tweets
that have been perceived as xenophobic or
elitist or both. As I write this, the award-
winning author of 58 novels, and thousands
of short stories, essays, and reviews is
debating the erotic origins of Dracula. “The
most powerful writing,” Oates says in her
“MasterClass” on the short story “comes
from confronting taboos.”
Oates achieved this in Blonde, drawing
on the preoccupations—sexual violence
perpetrated against women, and all that
is shameful and lonely about female
adolescence—that haunt many of her greatest
novels (Fox re: Confessions of a Girl Gang;
We Were the Mulvaneys; Rape: A Love Story).
This may be why the best parts of Blonde are
when Oates zeroes in on the young Monroe
and her time spent in orphanages and with
adults who couldn’t or shouldn’t care for her.
“Never can you climb over this wall,” Blonde’s
protagonist tells herself. “You’re not strong
enough...your body is for others, not for you.”
Oates began imagining the icon’s life
after discovering a blurry snapshot of her
at 15 years old, smiling radiantly, vacantly,
poignantly into the camera. “She looks
like girls I went to high school with,” the
Lockport, New York, native has said.
The bones of Monroe’s life—a glittering
Hollywood career, a drug dependency,
three failed marriages, hopeless attempts
to become a mother, humiliating sex with
a president, and death at age 36 —in thrall to
Oates’s prodigious imagination, render
a near-mythic story in esh and blood. QFrom top: Marilyn Monroe
in 1960; the new Ecco
reissue of Blonde; Joyce Carol
Oates in 2018.Back to BLONDE
Twenty years ago, JOYCE CAROL OATES published her epic
ctional account of Marilyn Monroe’s life—now, the story
makes a comeback in the #MeToo era By Patricia Bosworth
38 VANITY FAIR APRIL 2020
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