The book was to have ended with the words “Marilyn Monroe.” But as Oates watched all of Monroe’s movies, learned more about her intelligence and humor, her determination to be seen as a serious actress, and the intersection of her career with multiple strands of mid-twentieth-century American culture-sports, religion, crime, theatre, politics-she realized that she needed a larger fictional form to explore a woman who was much more than a victim. Initially, Oates planned to write a novella about the metamorphosis of an ordinary high-school girl into a star, who loses her real name and is given a studio name that will obliterate her history and identity. Oates identified with Norma Jeane’s innocence, as she recalled in an interview with her own biographer, Greg Johnson: “I felt an immediate sense of something like recognition this young, hopefully smiling girl, so very American, reminded me powerfully of girls of my childhood, some of them from broken homes.” Such girls, many of whom she had known growing up in rural upstate New York, had become characters in her short stories and novels, where their dreams usually ended in defeat. Oates first had the idea for this book when she saw a photograph of a radiant fifteen-year-old Norma Jeane Baker, not yet looking anything like Marilyn Monroe, winning a beauty contest in California, in 1941, with a crown of artificial flowers on her curly brown hair and a girlish locket around her neck. In her most ambitious novel, Oates uncannily channels Monroe’s inner voice and demands that the star be given recognition, compassion, and respect.

With this hallucinatory passage, Oates pulls us into a book about the fate of a female star in the Hollywood world of mirrors, smog, and shadows, a world where women’s bodies are commodities traded for titillation and profit.

Death furiously pedaling,” and also Death, the messenger from the Emily Dickinson poem, who kindly stops for the restless person who cannot wait for him. “MM” OCCUPANT 12305 FIFTH HELENA DRIVE BRENTWOOD CALIFORNIA USA “EARTH.”

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