The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe [Paperback]

There are many Marilyns: sex goddess and innocent child, crafty manipulator and dumb blonde, liberated woman and tragic loner.The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroereviews the unreliable and unverifiable--but highly significant--stories that have framed this Hollywood legend, all the while revealing the meanings behind the American myths that have made Marilyn what she is today.

In incisive and passionate prose, cultural critic Sarah Churchwell uncovers the shame, belittlement, and anxiety that we bring to the story of a woman we supposedly adore and, in the process, rescues a Marilyn Monroe who is far more complicated and credible than the one we think we know.

Raised in Illinois,Sarah Churchwellwas educated at Vassar and Princeton and is now a professor of American literature and culture at the University of East Anglia.

[A] sustained, strenuous critique of the lazy thinking, sloppy research, and overall softheadedness that characterize so much popular biographical writing. A. O. Scott, The New York Times Book Review

Smart, graceful, and lucid, this is a veritable Sherman's March through the Marilyn oeuvre, with bodies--Mailer, Oates, Miller--strewn everywhere. Instead of a torch, however, Churchwell wields a rapier, and if she flays the authors, it is to lay bare the anatomy of authorship in all its tangled complexity. Peter Biskind, author of Down and Dirty Pictures

Refreshing . . . Her book has torn away layers of false readings and conspiracy theories. The New York Times

Humane and skeptical . . . Churchwell has written an extremely useful deconstruction of the piffle that has accreted around her subject over the years . . . offering realistic alternatives to spiraling fantasies. Richard Schickel, Los Angeles Times

Ferociously smart . . . offers a rare combination of guilty pleasure and intellectual insight. Vogue

Sarah Churchwell wades through the conl#�