the book was okay but I don't think Marilyn and Berniece were that close so there wasn't a lot of information through Marilyn's point of view but it a lot better than some stranger that Marilyn didn't even explioting her.There are some personal information that only Berniece would know so that's what makes it unquic.

I recommend this book to anyone vaguely interested in Marilyn Monroe, not merely the die-hard fan. I do not fall into that category, , but am aware of her enduring presence as an icon. This book lived up to its intriguing promise of providing ANOTHER viewpoint about Marilyn – other than the myriad biographies which have been about Marilyn by ‘outsiders’ and those enriching themselves on the proceeds.

This is very much the biography of Norma Jean Baker as she came to be known by her sister.

The picture of ‘private Marilyn’ depicted here does an enormous amount to restore Marilyn’s humanity, her connection with her family and peers, the person behind the impenetrable Goddess Icon that she has become in the decades since her death. This is the uncommodified, unexploited Marilyn, a person who loved and was loved. It’s a great corrective to the hagiographic or shallow tendencies of most Marilyn-abilia and I thoroughly recommend it.

Please buy this book instead of one written by someone who didn't know Marilyn...

Berneice Miracle was Marilyn's half-sister. They shared the same mother, a fitfully employed lab worker at a Hollywood studio during the silent film era. When Marilyn aka Norma Jeane was seven and didn't know Berneice existed, their mother bought a house in Los Angeles, a daring move for a divorced woman at the height of the Great Depression. But Mom became mentally ill a few months later and spent the next fifty years as a revolving door mental patient and old-folks-home resident.

Berneice's father seems to have been a stable man who abandoned the liberal lifestyle of California for the Kentucky of 1926, a different planet. Whoever Marilyn's father was never claimed her as his daughter unless you count a phone call that C. Stanley Gifford supposedly made to her out-of-the-blue a year before she died. Even if Gifford was a dishonest stalker, we still know Marilyn's real father kept quiet, likely out of guilt and sensitivity.

That point brings me to Berneice. While she adds little to her half-sister's previously documented fights with Twentieth Century Fox, Arthur Miller and Patricia Newcomb, she nonetheless shares her sisterly information with sensitivity. Possibly without meaning to, Berneice demonstrates that Marilyn's amazing sensitivity, a requirement for all the artists who share her degree of fame (Billie Holiday, Georgia O'Keeffe, Elvis, Andy Kaufman, etc), ran in the family. The reader experiences Berneice's thin skin in every sentence. The reader witnesses mother Gladys' fragility overpower her, shattering her dream of becoming the new Norma Talmadge (the silent film star after whom Gladys named Norma Jeane). The silence of Marilyn's father echoes with meaning throughout this and other books.

I will close by segueing to the money issue. If you assume Berneice inherited big bucks and she hates everyone who profited from her half-sister's death, then remember the old saying about what you do when you [assume]. The abundant love in Marilyn came through when she made major provisions for Berneice in her will, but the suddenness of her death and the huge debts of her Estate blocked Berneice from getting a penny for fifteen years.

During that time Norman Mailer famously made money from a sloppy investigation into the Kennedy brothers sleeping with and killing Marilyn mixed with a pseudointellectual portrait of his beloved stranger as "the Stradivarius of sex." Mailer's attitude didn't exactly thrill Berneice, but she still wanted very much to know how her sister had died. She had no money to hire a private investigator. To this day Berneice harbors suspicions of foul play. If she, with her genetic sensitivity in the same league as Marilyn's, entertains these thoughts, then a lot more people should. Not just nerdy JFK researchers.

Please buy this book. Berneice, born in 1919 and alive as of this writing, deserves a little money and empathy. As Arthur Miller wrote in "Death Of A Salesman," "attention must be paid to such a [person]." If Berneice's grandchildren are out there reading this, please give her my love. If things sometimes stretch her or you to the breaking point, please remember the love.

I like Joyce Carol Oates. I don't consider her a great writer...but I do think that she has many merits. For the most part, Oates creates compelling characters and page-turning stories that never fail to entertain. Her novels are often intense and absorbing reads--although they lack real substance. Reading a truly great book is like eating a fabulous 6 course meal. Reading an Oates book is like eating a really good turkey sandwich.

Reading Blonde, however, was like eating mac & cheese with peas and carrots and cabbage and cinnamon on top! It's confusing, contradictory, messy, many of the elements just don't fit, and it just doesn't go down very well. I'm not a purist. I can enjoy a fictional account of a person's life as long as it manages to tell a good story and create a substantial, convincing, and captivating character. Blonde, however, completely fails at this. Oates' fails at doing the one thing she should have done with this novel--make us believe and fall in love with her Marilyn Monroe.

Throughout the novel, it seems that Oates never really knows how to portray her heroine. In one moment, Norma Jean (aka Marilyn) is a cowering, terrified bunny. In another moment, she's a shrewd actress-businesswoman of steel! In another, she is a artist-genius. In another, a country girl who just wants a husband and a baby. And Norma/Marilyn not only changes from one characterization to another within one chapter, but sometimes within one paragraph--or sentence! It's not that a human being can't be full of such contradictory facets and traits...It is just that Oates completely fails to make these complex contradictions believable. They have no basis. Oates' Marilyn is like a smudgy collage of one cliche after another...without any true defining core. As a result, it becomes impossible to identify with her, impossible to sympathize, and impossible to love her. Instead, I found myself frustrated and impatient through much of the novel--trying to figure out where NJ/M's actions and motivations were truly coming from.

The rest of the novel fails even more miserably. The secondary characters are even less interesting. The prose reads like that of a maudlin high school student. It is at times boring. At times laughably sentimental. At times sloppy and convoluted.

Although I have not read any other biographies of Marilyn Monroe, after reading Blonde, I now feel the urge to pick one up. I think a distant, more factual account of the actress' life would bring me to a closer understanding and appreciation for her than this book. My one suggestion to those who DO want a more intimate look into Marilyn Monroe--rent The Misfits--her last movie. Written by her former husband Arthur Miller, I am convinced that the character he wrote for her IS the real Marilyn Monroe--tragic and trusting and misunderstood.

An amazing - if exhausting - literary experience! Rarely has a novel taken me in so completely. JCO's Norma Jeane Baker aka "Marilyn" is one of the most heartrending characters to come along in literature in a long while. Whether fact or fiction -- as someone who isn't too familiar with the biographical details of Monroe's life I was somewhat curious to learn more about her -- taken as a literary heroine (or anti-heroine as it were) she breaks your heart.

Particularly strong is the first third of the novel, detailing her troubled relationship with her mentally unstable mother, the break-up of her first marriage, and her menage a trois with Cass Chaplin and E.G. Robnson Jr, the "Gemini" of one of the book's most intriguing chapters. This is a relationship that will haunt Marilyn for her entire "fictional" life, culminating in one of the cruelest (and most tragic) discoveries I have encountered in recent memory.

JCO's writing alternates from an almost Joycean stream-of-consciousness to sheer poetry, becoming increasingly disjointed and fractured as Marilyn dissolves before our eyes.

This is not an easy read from an emotional standpoint, though in terms of clarity of prose it reads like a dream. Certain sequences verge into the grotesque. Toward the end of the book (particularly in the sequence involving Marilyn's relationship with JFK and his brother-in-law aka "The President's Pimp") the reader -- at least this one -- may find him/herself saying "Okay, okay, enough already. I know where this is going." You're repulsed, horrified, impatient but you keep reading. I ploughed through the final hundred pages in one sitting, so intent and compulsive my need to get through it.

Having read this, I now want to go back and rent all of her films...

One must remember while reading that this is NOT a biography but a work of literary fiction ... and as much as possible, it should be treated as such, although I admit, there were many times where I wanted to know where the line between fiction and reality was crossed and how much of the distinction was blurred. Regardless, JCO's Marilyn is a triumph and this book -- whether you like it or not -- is a reading experience one is not likely to forget any time soon ... or ever. How many contemporary novels can honestly claim that distinction?

This book is one of the most heart-wrenching novels I have ever read. I had never seen any of MM's movies, and knew basically nothing about her before reading this book... afterward, I went out and rented everything. There is something so empathetic and real about Oates' Marilyn... she's just a normal girl who got caught up in something much bigger than herself. Maybe it's not a good sign for my own sanity that I understood the way Monroe thought, talked, and phrased things. But this book truly brought me closer to this lovely, tragic, modern-day royalty than I ever would have dreamed possible. If you read one book, read this one. It is a powerful, moving testiment to a 1950's woman in a man's world.