Being Blonde

In Blonde, author Joyce Carol Oates puts a fictional spin on the complex life of Marilyn Monroe. It has been 38 years since the movie star died, yet she continues to fascinate the public.

It was a particular photograph of the young Norma Jean Baker that inspired Oates to write the book.

"She looked very little like the iconic Marilyn Monroe and didn't have the synthetic blonde hair," explains the author. "She had dark curly hair and a little heart locket. But I was struck by her smile, which was so yearning and girlish and hopeful. And I thought of her, in an odd way, as a quintessentially American girl at her time and place."

In that photo, Oates recognized the kind of girl she grew up with. "I loved those girls, and I've lost them all," she recalls. "Some got married and dropped out. They often came from broken homes, had abusive fathers; they needed very much to be loved. And they were all very pretty. They needed their beauty and used it to be loved, to get the love they needed so much. They were desperate to be attractive to boys. I was more introspective and bookish, and I had a stable family."

Monroe's life, she says, is almost like a Cinderella story in reverse because "when she gets what she thinks she wants, it turns out to be something hollow, and she did die prematurely at age 36."

Oates came to identify with Monroe so strongly that she developed psychosomatic symptoms that she never had before. "When I had to write the end of the book, her death from a drug overdose - which I believe was probably accidental - it was unbearable. I couldn't stand to see her die."

By writing about Monroe in a fictional mode, Oates says she intended to give her subject "a poetic spiritual life."

There is much to learn even from her fictional inner voice, Oates explains, because she represents "the natural actor or the artist who wants desperately to create something that she can leave behind and be proud of."

Oates says that Monroe was very much an actress.

"Unless you've had the experience I had of watching her movies one after the other, night after night, you may not see how very much an actress she was, how she created roles," she explains. "She was a perfectionist and worked very hard through her life. Most people don't think of a woman like Marilyn Monroe as actually working and working hard to be who she is. Though not well educated, Norma Jean was smart. Norma Jean had an untrained intellect."

In a five-part narrative, she re-imagines Monroe's life as an epic, drawing on biographical and historical sources as she presents her characters in a unique way. Ex-husband Arthur Miller, for example, is referred to as The Playwright. Joe DiMaggio is The Ex-Athlete and John F. Kennedy's brother-in-law, Peter Lawford, is The President's Pimp, just to name a few.

On the composition of her book, Oates notes that her novel is not a factua transcription of Monroe's life, yet she says, "Blonde is not, I believe, an unrealistic idealized portrait of this emblematic American artist who lost her way."

The young Norma Jean, says Oates, was a very insecure girl who yearned to be loved and to be a "good girl" and to be accepted by an audience.

The iconic Marilyn Monroe is the person we know from the outside. But Oates theorizes that she had to have felt "somewhat disillusioned" with the experience.

The author explains, "When she played the characters that she was supposed to play, then she was a box office success. When she played characters she wanted to play, which were deeper and more complex, the public drew away from her."

The jacket of her book reads:

"A lush-bodied girl in the prime of her physical beauty. In an ivory georgette crepe sundress with a halter top that gathers her breasts up in soft undulating folds of the fabric. She's standing with bare legs apart on a New York subway grating. Her blond head is thrown rapturously back as an updraft lifts her full, flaring skirt, exposing white cotton panties. White cotton! The ivory-crepe sundress is floating and filmy as magic. The dress is magic. Without the dress the girl would be female meat, raw and exposed."

At age 25, she published her first collection of stories, By the North Gate. From 1968 to 1978, Oates taught at the University of Windsor in Canada. During this stretch, she published many books of different genres, becoming widely recognized as an author.

Her novels such as Wonderland, A Garden of Earthly Delight, Expensive People and Them are well-known.

She has instructed at Princeton University since 1978 where she has served as the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities.

With her husband Raymond J. Smith, she publishes The Ontario Review, a literary magazine distributed in Ontario, Canada.