Book Review: Fragments

Book #2 of 2011

I had never really understood the immense love for Marilyn Monroe. Her death was tragic, sure, but the way she’s idolized baffles me. Then again, that’s true of a lot of celebrity as far as I’m concerned. 

Anyway, last year I began to appreciate her more as I began to discover the personality behind her persona. Of course, I’m aware that I still have no idea who Marilyn Monroe was, and by saying that I am not saying that I have any sort of insight to her. But I found out she liked to read, and was quite intelligent, and wrote often beautiful pieces. She had an eager mind, and her friendships with people like Carson McCullers and Truman Capote began to make more sense. Capote wrote about her in Music for Chameleons, and that showed me another side of her, too.

This book is a collection of some gorgeous photographs — the kind of photographs I like to see Marilyn in, with a book, or in a living room, or on a rooftop. It’s not photographs of her dress flying up or a pouty face. It’s also a collection of her writing, which is presented as it was found, more or less. They include where she has crossed things out, the direction she wrote in (sometime diagonally in the margin as she was running out of space) and the arrows she used to connect different lines. Since she wasn’t a writer, her work was sporadic and messy, with final versions unavailable if they even ever existed. You get the impression that she wrote because she was trying to order her mind, to find some order in the chaos, and I admire her for that. 

The book is a quick read, but it’s beautiful. She’s not the best writer you’ll ever read but her writing has a humanism I love. What I love most, though, is that she elicits a reaction precisely because you feel like you’re being walked through her writing process, and as a result, the patterns of her mind.