We may think we know all about Marilyn Monroe, but a new publication of never-before-seen diaries, notes, letters and poems, set for release October 12, promises to unveil a whole new Marilyn to us, almost 50 years after the icon’s death.
These bits of intimate text—jotted in notebooks, typed on paper, or written on hotel letterhead, and compiled as Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters by Marilyn Monroe—reveal a woman who loved deeply and strove to perfect her art. They portray a Marilyn Monroe unsparing in the harsh analysis of her own life, but also playful, funny, and irresistibly charming. She is shown as a worldly, intelligent, and cultured yet tortured woman, consumed by both profound sadness and optimism.
Throughout the diaries, she makes references to her crippling insecurities, shockingly portrays a woman being unworthy of affection and reveals what may have been her greatest fear: Disappointing the people she loved.
The diaries and letters were discovered among Monroe’s personal effects, which she left to her acting teacher, Lee Strasberg, on her death in Los Angeles in 1962 at the age of 36.
Through her poetry, Marilyn sheds light on her marriages to James Dougherty, Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller.
Vanity Fair has published some of the poems:
On husband, Arthur Miller:
my love sleeps besides me —
in the faint light — I see his manly jaw
give way — and the mouth of his
boyhood returns
with a softness softer
its sensitiveness trembling
in stillness
his eyes must have look out
wonderously from the cave of the little
boy — when the things he did not understand —
he forgot
This one, titled After One Year of Analysis:
And
Help help
Help
I feel life coming closer
when all I want
Is to die.
Scream —
You began and ended in air
but where was the middle?