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A review by lpm100
My Story by Marilyn Monroe
4.0
Book Review
4 stars
Pithy, quotable, and incomplete autobiography of a convert to Judaism.
*******
This book felt like it was castrated.
It started from the beginning and went all the way through to the beginning of the second marriage.
There was still another marriage to go, as well as a conversion to Judaism (which was actually the thing in which I was interested and which sold me on the book).
"My Story" was published in 1974, 12 years after Marilyn Monroe died. (There have been lots of books written about the subject, but I believe that this is her only autobiography.)
And the edition that I'm reading was published 33 years after that-- with the addition of many many pictures of the photogenic Monroe.
*******
Of the book:
The chapters are extremely short. (35 chapters over 185 pages of prose works out to just over five pages per chapter.)
Even though the book was very short, Monroe managed to reveal everything by covering only what was necessary.
It took very few words to say a lot (=the opposite of Ayn Rand). The writing almost has an Eric Hofferesque feel, as if it was crafted as a series of aphorisms.
For some reason, the editor was determined to make this into a combination of an autobiography and a modeling portfolio: The entire introduction is taken up with discussions of the photos of Monroe, and even though the actual length of the book is 185 pages.... something like 85 of the pages are pictures and 100 of them are prose.
And even though Monroe was a very nice looking person, I wanted to know a little bit more about the person behind the facade. (And I won't be reading any of these other biographies because the time-cost exceeds the value of the information.)
Part of the problem with books that are written by co-authors is that one never knows how much of the voice is that of the subject versus that of the co-author.
That said:
°°Marilyn Monroe, as exposited here, is extremely pithy, quotable and plain-spoken.
(p.29): "....husbands are chiefly good as lovers when they are betraying their wives."
(p.46): "If there are any books on the subject, I must have skipped them, along with a few million other books I haven't read."
(p.53): "You're judged by how you look, not by what you are. Hollywood's a place where they'll pay you $1,000 for a kiss and 50 cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough and held out for the 50 cents."
(p.73): "It is hard to explain how you can fall in love while you are being bored to death, but I know it's true, because it happened to me several times."
(p. 128): "The most unsatisfactory men are those who pride themselves on their virility and regard sex as if it were some form of athletics and would you win cups. It is a woman's spirit and mood a man has to stimulate in order to make sex interesting."
(p. 129): "I've seen women at parties who had only enough clothes on to keep from being arrested."
°°She was also very perceptive, and she makes us very aware of the vicious competition and general ugliness the people will encounter when trying to make a living in Hollywood. (A dumb blonde, this girl was not.)
°°It seems that Monroe had a very difficult life:
1. Being abandoned by her father (because he was not interested to stay around and raise a child).
2. Being constructively abandoned by her mother, who was institutionalized too much to take care of her.
3. Being raped at 9 years old.
4. Living in nine different foster homes as a child. (Some really cute places in here. One of them where the toilet was only flushed in the morning because it was five gallons of water per flush. Another where everybody in the house used the same bath water and Monroe was the last person to bathe.)
5. There was a lot of severe mental illness on both sides of her family with several close relatives.
And this author was suspiciously intelligent in the way that a lot of mentally ill people are:
1. Distorted perceptions. (For instance, she says that Louis Calhern committed suicide on p. 112. But, it appears that he died of a heart attack.)
2. A penchant for self-destruction. (Ch.25)
3. She knew the end even while she was at the beginning. (p.73): "I was the kind of girl they found dead in a hall bedroom with an empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand"
4. Unwilling to be happy about anything or allow herself to enjoy anything. All of those years knocking herself out to prove that she was a star, and then finally when stardom came complaining about the quality thereof. (For the life of me, I can't figure out why people have objections to playing a certain type of character. By definition, being an actor is getting paid to pretend that you are somebody you aren't.)
Of her Monroe's career:
1. She was bigger in death than in life;
2. There were MANY lean years before fame and success;
3. Acting and singing classes only came after she actually went to hollywood.
******
I don't guess that is a secret that people who have traumatic childhoods are never able to recover from them--and even when they are surrounded by people who love them or fame and popularity, it is just never enough for them to shake it off. (My father grew up extremely indigent, and the trauma was such that he was never able to get out of drug abuse. And he probably did not take maximum benefit out of having a devoted wife and two children because he couldn't fully perceive them.)
Loneliness is the most persistent theme of this book, even though people with nice looks can have the world as their oyster much of the time. ("Loneliness was tough, the toughest role you ever played. Hollywood created a superstar, and pain was the price you paid.")
And so, this chronicle of something that has happened many many times before is only different in that the person upon whom this misfortune was visited was extremely nice looking and (posthumously) famous.
NO INDEX.
Verdict: Recommended at the price of $5.
Caveat emptor! The book is incomplete.
4 stars
Pithy, quotable, and incomplete autobiography of a convert to Judaism.
*******
This book felt like it was castrated.
It started from the beginning and went all the way through to the beginning of the second marriage.
There was still another marriage to go, as well as a conversion to Judaism (which was actually the thing in which I was interested and which sold me on the book).
"My Story" was published in 1974, 12 years after Marilyn Monroe died. (There have been lots of books written about the subject, but I believe that this is her only autobiography.)
And the edition that I'm reading was published 33 years after that-- with the addition of many many pictures of the photogenic Monroe.
*******
Of the book:
The chapters are extremely short. (35 chapters over 185 pages of prose works out to just over five pages per chapter.)
Even though the book was very short, Monroe managed to reveal everything by covering only what was necessary.
It took very few words to say a lot (=the opposite of Ayn Rand). The writing almost has an Eric Hofferesque feel, as if it was crafted as a series of aphorisms.
For some reason, the editor was determined to make this into a combination of an autobiography and a modeling portfolio: The entire introduction is taken up with discussions of the photos of Monroe, and even though the actual length of the book is 185 pages.... something like 85 of the pages are pictures and 100 of them are prose.
And even though Monroe was a very nice looking person, I wanted to know a little bit more about the person behind the facade. (And I won't be reading any of these other biographies because the time-cost exceeds the value of the information.)
Part of the problem with books that are written by co-authors is that one never knows how much of the voice is that of the subject versus that of the co-author.
That said:
°°Marilyn Monroe, as exposited here, is extremely pithy, quotable and plain-spoken.
(p.29): "....husbands are chiefly good as lovers when they are betraying their wives."
(p.46): "If there are any books on the subject, I must have skipped them, along with a few million other books I haven't read."
(p.53): "You're judged by how you look, not by what you are. Hollywood's a place where they'll pay you $1,000 for a kiss and 50 cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough and held out for the 50 cents."
(p.73): "It is hard to explain how you can fall in love while you are being bored to death, but I know it's true, because it happened to me several times."
(p. 128): "The most unsatisfactory men are those who pride themselves on their virility and regard sex as if it were some form of athletics and would you win cups. It is a woman's spirit and mood a man has to stimulate in order to make sex interesting."
(p. 129): "I've seen women at parties who had only enough clothes on to keep from being arrested."
°°She was also very perceptive, and she makes us very aware of the vicious competition and general ugliness the people will encounter when trying to make a living in Hollywood. (A dumb blonde, this girl was not.)
°°It seems that Monroe had a very difficult life:
1. Being abandoned by her father (because he was not interested to stay around and raise a child).
2. Being constructively abandoned by her mother, who was institutionalized too much to take care of her.
3. Being raped at 9 years old.
4. Living in nine different foster homes as a child. (Some really cute places in here. One of them where the toilet was only flushed in the morning because it was five gallons of water per flush. Another where everybody in the house used the same bath water and Monroe was the last person to bathe.)
5. There was a lot of severe mental illness on both sides of her family with several close relatives.
And this author was suspiciously intelligent in the way that a lot of mentally ill people are:
1. Distorted perceptions. (For instance, she says that Louis Calhern committed suicide on p. 112. But, it appears that he died of a heart attack.)
2. A penchant for self-destruction. (Ch.25)
3. She knew the end even while she was at the beginning. (p.73): "I was the kind of girl they found dead in a hall bedroom with an empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand"
4. Unwilling to be happy about anything or allow herself to enjoy anything. All of those years knocking herself out to prove that she was a star, and then finally when stardom came complaining about the quality thereof. (For the life of me, I can't figure out why people have objections to playing a certain type of character. By definition, being an actor is getting paid to pretend that you are somebody you aren't.)
Of her Monroe's career:
1. She was bigger in death than in life;
2. There were MANY lean years before fame and success;
3. Acting and singing classes only came after she actually went to hollywood.
******
I don't guess that is a secret that people who have traumatic childhoods are never able to recover from them--and even when they are surrounded by people who love them or fame and popularity, it is just never enough for them to shake it off. (My father grew up extremely indigent, and the trauma was such that he was never able to get out of drug abuse. And he probably did not take maximum benefit out of having a devoted wife and two children because he couldn't fully perceive them.)
Loneliness is the most persistent theme of this book, even though people with nice looks can have the world as their oyster much of the time. ("Loneliness was tough, the toughest role you ever played. Hollywood created a superstar, and pain was the price you paid.")
And so, this chronicle of something that has happened many many times before is only different in that the person upon whom this misfortune was visited was extremely nice looking and (posthumously) famous.
NO INDEX.
Verdict: Recommended at the price of $5.
Caveat emptor! The book is incomplete.