What Marilyn Monroe means to me

until my I truly understand Marilyn Monroe’s first birthday, in all her beautiful and painful glory. As far as these things go, it’s not a very happy birthday. That year 209 Already suffered three humiliations: convalescence, loss of fertility, and the breakup everyone expected (hard to know if it was a better or worse kind). Unlike the taciturn Marilyn – her early years s made her own

– public shaming of car crashes, but who rarely speaks about any of them – I never shut up and I certainly don’t put on red lipstick to hide the sad truth. I’m so resistant to celebrating that my friends decided to throw a craft party for me as if I were a diehard – Her class needs to be bribed to participate in her celebration. Amid the tempera, sequins, and gooey eyes, we sip ginger ale — Dom for a sober woman — and friends nod lovingly patiently as I decorate the jewelry box with pastel hues. I’ve gotten out of my adulthood fantasies, but I’m still not living like an adult, and I can’t find much reason to try.

Among a bunch of gifts from friends – a tie-dye sweatshirt, a pearly locket with a picture of my dog , a pair of shoes with cat ears on the toe – is a book from my friend Alyssa, who made the shaming of women her life cause with rare empathy (we do it together now, in a book called

on the podcast) C-Word,

We spent nearly

The place hours detailing the triumphs and sufferings of female eccentrics, idols and even murderers – a gothic hobby, but a hobby nonetheless). As night fell, adults with glittering hands smoked cigarettes on subway grills, talking about daycare, mortgages, and other things I forgot to want. Alyssa handed me her gift, the thick white coffee table book with the corners tugged at by frays – Norman Mailer’s Ode to Marilyn (and Essay About Marilyn) , the title is just her name. On the inside cover, Alissa wrote: “For Lena—she, like Marilyn, has something for everyone.” At that moment, when I felt like I had nothing, I held onto it: the Bible and the life raft.

It can be argued that no woman has been examined more closely. She received book lists from public intellectuals, biographers and fiction writers — not just Mailer, but Gloria Steinem and Joyce Carroll Oates, whose novels, Blonde, will get the movie treatment next month starring Ana de Armas. She’s a rude American over-the-top figure standing in Madame Tussauds, her skirt blowing forever upwards, and her famous dress in Ripley’s Believe It or Not! (More solemnly, on the Met Gala red carpet last spring). her death 05 Years ago, a barbiturate overdose in her Brentwood bed created a conspiracy theorist cottage industry— Is it the CIA? murder? – Some people who had only brief contact with her made a living by talking about it. We could even Google her picture at the morgue if we wanted to. It’s easy to see what she meant when Megan Fox triumphantly got her a tattoo, then removed it, saying, “I don’t want to attract this negative energy in my life.” Marilyn’s reputation was—and is now—giant but lonely, enduring but impersonal. Who really sees the truth and is willing to wear it as a totem?

Marilyn’s public persona is playful, seductive, and purposeful of. She poses as she lives in the ecstasy of eternal summer

As a young woman, I didn’t pay much attention to her. I was obsessed with things that I thought shifted the cultural landscape toward something more…weird—Gilda Radner, Grace Jones, and later Tina Fey. I think the girls who cite Monroe as inspiration are trite at best and boring at worst. I did pose as Marilyn for a magazine — with bleached hair and sucking on a cream-studded cherry — but only after convincing myself it was a vulgar comment on the kind of woman we thought was worthy of attention.

It was, finally, reading her private life that showed me both her successes and her tragedies. Marilyn’s public persona is playful, seductive, and purposeful. She poses as she lives in the ecstasy of eternal summer, the voice of her breathing conveys an appealing lack of need – but her private life is full of pain. Abuse, addiction and abandonment defined her until, at 05, she is dead and forever haunted by the fantasies of all of us Americans. Thirty-six years — an age that didn’t seem to be decisive when I first learned her story. But now here I am – Semi, to be exact – I understand once you go beyond your amazings. become05 is to understand that while more life can be expected, some things cannot. If you don’t have kids, either you’ve made that decision or you’ve entered a panic-filled hope phase. If you’re not yet seen as what you believe — you feel that people don’t know how serious or powerful or sexy you are — you’ve realized that changing that will be an uphill struggle. Thirty-six is an age without proper support structures and confidence, it’s easy to roll over, say “fuck it”, and go back to sleep. It seems, based on all the all-too-available photos of the bed where she was found dead, that’s what Marilyn did.

Marilyn – once the famous Norma Jane Baker, born to a single mother who was later diagnosed with schizophrenia – her young life was like a small inconvenience living home from home. When she , instead of being recommitted to foster care, she married a year old neighbor, marked the journey of “this bed is too hard, this bed is too soft” , which would take her through two marriages and countless relationships. The public celebrated her union with Joe DiMaggio until nine months after they were married, she burst into tears outside her Beverly Hills house to file for divorce. In the footage that is still available, her pain is maddening – her longing to disappear, her struggle with the camera’s failure. Then when she married Arthur Miller, in a widely speculated alliance because they seemed to occupy different intellectual spaces, she tried living in a Connecticut home, studying watercolor and turning to the role of muse. But Miller’s love letters, especially one sold at auction, show that he’s obsessed with her body, like any boy with a poster of her above his bedside : Make breakfast there and I’ll kiss your neck, your back, the sweet cantaloupe on your hips and your knees, then turn around and kiss your breasts and the eggs will burn .

”

Privately, Marilyn suffers – not just from constant anxiety and depression, doctors are happy to treat with these medications (where I can relate, relying on off-the-shelf chemical shields to get through Fears of my old age s). She also treated severe endometriosis, a A reproductive disorder that is still badly misunderstood, which is why I expelled my uterus in old age .Marilyn was obsessed with being a mother, believing it would heal the loneliness that plagued her. When she was having her appendix removed , she was rumored to have put a note on her stomach begging them not to take it Walk her ovaries. Marilyn’s miscarriage in 99 (At the time, Palm Springs newspapers Desert Sun reported she was pregnant five to six weeks,” Curvy screen star being pushed into hospital on a stretcher”) is said to be a major factor in depression, which accelerated her drug addiction and plagued her movie swan song, The Misfits.

Infertility makes people question your woman Identity – I spent two whole years asking myself what my purpose was, despite being busy with work and knowing intellectually that this family took many forms. But imagine being the most discussed woman in the world, valued and cursed for your feminine power – what would you be like that Women can’t do what we think women should do? Women get pregnant without even trying, so I’ve tried all my life – in every way – and still come home empty-handed, a humiliation older than I know. Without the child she wanted, Marilyn was just another lonely rising star who had several broken marriages – of the “we told you” kind – she paid for her interests but continued to treat her whole bunch People as a one-time resource.

Marilyn does have something for everyone. If you feel like you’re being held captive by men’s perceptions of your beauty, she’s a cautionary tale. However, if you feel like your body is too big, too wild, or too different, she’ll make those talking curves louder than she can through the snug fabric. If you feel like you’re not being taken seriously by those in power, Marilyn is someone who has never been an actress, poet, or painter in her personal time. If you want proof that sex kittens can powerfully change culture, she’s there, singing “Happy Birthday” to the president who happens to be her former lover. She’s in Las Vegas, New York and Hollywood. She was Troy Helen of the Kennedy family. I live in three different neighborhoods, and in multiple cities, people claim it’s her home – it doesn’t matter if that’s true. She is everywhere. Although everywhere and everyone has something, she has something just for me. Her story is a slanted fairytale I could wear like that dog photo locket, believing – as many believe – the way I see her different.

I used to think Marilyn was not old, and very old. Now, 30 It’s been years since she died, and at the same age she was when that happened, I don’t think she could be young. If she lived to one wrinkle, she could have had five other acts—mother, serious actress, memoir writer, game show fixture, showbiz oldie. What would that look like? Will she be frustrated by the attention, or will she love it?

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