A review by roxymaybe
The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick by Mallory O'Meara

1.0

At the beginning of this book the author recalls indignation at the suggestion that Milicent Patrick's life isn't interesting enough to fill a whole book. Unfortunately, that person was right. This book is more diversion than content, with lots of personal anecdotes from the author (including fretting over what to wear to a visit to the Mormon archives) and deep dives into people on the peripheries of Milicent's life. When she does talk about Milicent, there's a LOT of focus on how glamorous she looked.
The most galling part, to me, was the constant confident descriptions of what Milicent and other long-dead figures thought and felt, explicitly influenced by the author's own relationships. A long section deriding Milicent's sister ends with a comparison to the behaviour of the author's own estranged mother. It's very clear that this wasn't written by a trained historian, but it also sucks as a memoir.