Blonde: A Novel by Joyce Carol Oates: book review

Blonde is the work of an author “re-imagining” the life of Norma Jeane Baker and her evolution into Marilyn Monroe, the iconic American actress. The 2009 novel by Joyce Carol Oates, is a work of fiction, not a biography.

The epic novel structures Marilyn’s life into five parts: The Child (1932-1938); The Girl (1942-1947); The Woman (1949-1953); “Marilyn” (1953-1958); and The Afterlife (1959-1962). Written in the third person, it is interspersed with the voice of Marilyn: “But they don’t know me really. They didn’t recognize me.”

It is a detailed story of her stammer, abandonment, life in an orphanage, barbiturates, her mother’s unbalanced mental state, modeling, miscarriages, and of her lovers, marriages, and movies. It details how she met and married each of her three husbands: marine James Dougherty; baseball player Joe DiMaggio; and playwright Arthur Miller. It also details her affairs, especially the alleged affairs with President John F. Kennedy and his brother Senator Robert Kennedy.

Nothing is left unsaid: from the modeling sessions in 1945 which led to a change of name (to Marilyn Monroe) and a change in hair colour (from brunette to blonde) to the completion of “the look” in 1953 during her role as Rose in “Niagara.”

Her death on August 5, 1962, at the age of 36, in her Los Angeles home after midnight was officially classified as “probable suicide” caused by “acute barbiturate poisoning” but rumours included accidental overdose and murder. The novel “re-imagines” what really happened.

Intricately detailed and powerfully emotive, it masterfully blurs the boundaries, so much that readers never know where fiction ends and facts begin.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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