Marilyn Monroe was a troubled woman who wanted to understand herself, her institutionalized mother, and her chaotic childhood. She wanted to understand her pain and be released from it. Her whole family had seemed to yield to madness, so the threat of “insanity” stalked her at every turn. She sought to educate and get cutting edge treatment to strip off what she feared was inevitable. Most of her life she wasn’t the glamourous starlet we envision her to be. Under the glitter was a regular girl trying to get a grip on things and constantly trying to learn and improve. She read at length, and treated everyone she encountered as a teacher. Poetry was her favorite. She would delight in words, seeking to frame and define her twisting and glorious emotions. Gloria Steinem was one of the first biographers to look for Marilyn the person. After she wrote a relatable article about Marilyn in Ms. Magazine, tons of letters poured in from women who identified with Marilyn in some way. They, too, had suffered miscarriages, domestic violence, childhood molestation that no one believed. They had been overprescribed painkillers, sleeping pills and tranquilizers for common problems, they, too, struggled with the difference between their internal identity and the way others perceived them.
Marilyn represented something so big on the screen, something so inaccessible and fantastic, that her vulnerability could seem aggressive. “How dare she be just as vulnerable and unconfident as I felt?” Gloria says she asked herself when she was younger, before she started trying to understand who Marilyn was. Gloria later attended a class at the Actor’s Studio, where Marilyn studied but never tried out, and saw how small, plainly dressed, and unassuming she was in person. She got to witness Marilyn as a diffident actress who was intimidated by her place in the world. She wasn’t always a confident