In her Author’s Note, Oates writes, “ Blonde is a radically distilled ‘life’ in the form of fiction, and, for all its length, synecdoche is the principle of appropriation.” The same could be said of Oates’s Blonde. I first read Blonde soon after it was published. I was living in LA, just one street over from where Marilyn had lived and died. I knew nothing about her, and after reading Blonde, what remained with me was Oates’s description of the power dynamic between the old Hollywood studio system and their stars. At the time, I worked for a large talent agency, a business that emerged to counter the studios’ control over talent. I was in the midst of my MFA thesis, a collection of poems in conversation with Marilyn Monroe. Concerned with celebrity culture in America, I’d chosen this enduring icon as the star of my thesis and what would become the collection An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe and then Marilyn: Essays & Poems. So, this time reading Blonde, I saw how far Oates strayed from the biography of Marilyn Monroe. Her Blonde is much more than “a radically distilled ‘life’ in the form of fiction.” Oates took the rough contours of Marilyn’s life and fictionalized an entirely other character and story. One that-in my second, more-informed reading-I liked less. This time, I saw Oates’s characterization as playing into and with stereotype. Her fictionalized Marilyn in no way resembled the Marilyn I had come to know through my research and writing-Oates had realized a version of Norma Jeane Baker, and of Marilyn Monroe, and eventually of a third identity, “the Blonde,” into her own created character. Then along came Hollywood (read: Netflix) with Andrew Dominik’s film adaptation of Blonde to further distort the memory and biography of Marilyn.īut does that matter? It’s entertainment after all, storytelling. And I, too, have used Marilyn Monroe for my own literary ambitions. In fact, during a conversation following a reading I gave in New York, when asked whether I was concerned about appropriation when writing in the persona of Marilyn, I responded with something about fiction and the public domain of dead celebrities-but then I finally answered that for me, it’s a matter of intention. In writing Marilyn through poetry, I set an intention to get as close as possible to the bone of Marilyn and to write from there. To give a voice to the woman who had become nothing more than a famous face. Along the way, I grew to understand my subject and to respect the woman who became Marilyn Monroe. The Blonde Marilyn has no agency in the world she is victimized at every turn. I also wrote to understand why Marilyn, above all other actresses, has endured in the world’s imagination 60 years after her death.
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