Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters Author: Visit Amazon's Marilyn Monroe Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0374533784 | Format: PDF
Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters Description
Review
"There is delight in this picture of the icon as more sincere, striving, intellectually ambitious, and perceptive than we’d ever have guessed."
--Publishers Weekly
"Sentences trail across the page, then merge in clumps, like paper airplanes tossed into a net; multiple cross-outs, repetitions and misspellings make them a challenge to decipher. Nonetheless, a certain potency resides in their runic quality…Passionate decoders of the Monroe legacy will have a field day.."
--The New York Times
About the Author
Marilyn Monroe was the defining actress of her age. Born in Los Angeles in 1926, Monroe first gained notice for small but memorable roles in The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve in 1950. Over the next decade, she starred in numerous films, including Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Some Like It Hot, How to Marry a Millionaire, and The Seven Year Itch. Acclaimed for these and many other performances, Monroe also studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. She died in 1962.
- Paperback: 256 pages
- Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (October 16, 2012)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0374533784
- ISBN-13: 978-0374533786
- Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 7.5 x 0.5 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Was there a film star as famous as Marilyn Monroe? A star that became even more famous in death then in life. In the end all we know of her is what other people have written, or the photographs that were taken of her. All of it, the writing, the images, it has all been staged to make us think whatever it is the crafter wished us to respond to. All of it until NOW.
With this book Fragments, we have for the first time what Marilyn thought, what she wrote, and how she was. We see her gifts as a person and her craft, not the image, not the notoriety. In the 1950's she came to New York and grew very close to Lee Strasberg, who was the head of the Actor's Studio. Strasberg who we all know as the Meyer Lansky type figure in the second Godfather movie was very enamored of Marilyn as we all were.
The funniest line in the book is when Strasberg who is a stickler for being on time complains to her about being timely for meetings. She says she simply cannot be on time. Strasberg's response was, "Then be early."
When she died in the summer of 1962, she left her belongings to Strasberg who was married to a much younger woman Anna. Years later, Anna went through the boxes that Marilyn had entrusted to Strasberg. Mrs. Strasberg came across a collection of writings on random pieces of paper such as hotel stationery, envelopes, and a series of different notebooks never completed. The writings also included poems, some finished, some unfinished.
Much of the material was written in a disjointed fashion, with scribing and cross outs, sentences started here, and finished somewhere else. Marilyn had her own way of doing things.
I'll start my review by making some personal comments first; I don't usually review books, but since this is about Marilyn Monroe and since I am also a fan of hers, I'll make an exception in this case.
One of the main reasons in purchasing `Fragments' was to read her poetry, sadly, there's not that much in my view, (Very Disappointing) and as a poet myself I would have liked more, (perhaps her complete collection-as yet as I understand it, there is no book that has her complete poetry, 'My Sex is Ice Cream:The Marilyn Monroe Poems' by Nellie McClung, comes to mind, but as I don't know if this has all of Marilyn's poetry, I can't really comment, but if there is a book out there, please let me know) searching the Internet you can found some of Marilyn's poetry which isn't in this book; although I did recognise two of Marilyn's poems within 'Fragments', but overall the book only offered (extended) glimpses. If Marilyn had lived, I think she would have produced a book of poetry, with great success, in my mind.
As for the rest of `Fragments', I am in two minds, at first I was very excited about reading Marilyn's thoughts, as this would give me an insight into her world so I could understand her and not just as an actress, but as a person.
Marilyn was a woman of deep reflection, not just about herself, her doubts, her being and her reason for living, but about her world around her and the people she came into contact with, `Fragments' shows Marilyn's intellect (a dumb blonde she is not); she tried so hard to comprehend her world, to prove to others, she was more than the 1950s icon, which we now associate.
No one really gave her a chance to prove her worth in Hollywood, so Marilyn rebelled to only way she could.
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