If Jeffrey Epstein was the shadow that would ultimately loom over I’m the Girl, Marilyn Monroe was the spark that brought it into being. I didn’t pick up Fragments and My Story because I thought my next book would be there, I picked them up because I’d read something about how much Marilyn both needed and felt betrayed by her work and I wanted to know more; a small, though inextricable thread in what turned out to be my Leonard Cohen year. I found and was comforted by those sentiments in her loosely defined memoirs—but I also found something more: the awful push-and-pull that comes with possessing one of the most commodified bodies in Hollywood, the world.
In My Story, Marilyn describes herself as having the body of a seventeen-year-old by the time she was twelve. After borrowing a friend’s tight-fitting sweater, she’s surprised to see her social currency go up. (“I had known for some time that I had shapely breasts and thought nothing of that fact.”) She catches the interest of boys and the ire of girls and has the intrinsic understanding something important is happening to her: “[It was] as if I were two people. One of them was Norma Jean from the orphanage who belonged to nobody. The other was someone whose name I didn’t know. But I knew where she belonged. She belonged to the ocean and the sky and the whole world.”
Later in life, the cost of this ‘belonging’ becomes bitterly clear. After singing a song for wounded soldiers in Korea, she was pulled aside and told it was too suggestive. “I hadn’t sung [it] with any suggestive meaning . . . But I knew there was no use arguing about it. I’d been up against this kind of thing before. People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of mirror instead of a person. They didn’t see me, they saw their own lewd thoughts.”
These contrasting, co-existing perspectives stayed with me.
And then, later, the shadow: Epstein’s preference was for young girls who leaned white and blonde.
What does it mean to be the patriarchy’s dream? To embody the ideal of a violent and oppressive power structure that operates at the expense of everyone and everything to maintain its hold? What does personal and sexual autonomy look like—if it can exist at all—under those circumstances? If you’re rewarded by meeting the standards established by this power structure, does that mean, on some level, you can own or control the power you’re benefiting from?
At one point in I’m the Girl, a character tells Georgia she’s the kind of beautiful that’s “always leaving somebody behind” and while Georgia knows this, it’s the body she has and the world she lives in.
What else is she supposed to do?
I’m the Girl is about a sixteen-year-old girl holding the tension of all of this and how hard it is to reconcile and to articulate at such a vulnerable age, when you know nothing about the world—but the world knows about you. When I wrote it, I knew I could never use—and refused to use—Georgia’s point-of-view to moralize or make larger commentaries about her experiences than she, as a character, was capable of making at the time. If I did, it would deny readers the opportunity to understand the impact of the classist, misogynistic, patriarchal world Georgia’s grown up in and how it defines what happens to her. It would deny them the opportunity to look inside themselves to really consider its far-reaching consequences, the complicity that allows it to thrive, how many people it hurts, and who it leaves behind.
These are just some of the things that haunted me enough to build I’m the Girl around and its readers will find that Georgia’s story crystallizes them into a single question and—
I just hope they have the courage to answer it.
When I finished Marilyn’s memoirs, I would often look up photos from the Barris photo shoot and pore over them for long stretches at a time, heartbroken.
I wondered if, by then—so close to her end—she was only a mirror.
And if, by then, when she looked in one, nothing was reflected back at her.
This was so beautifully written, thank you for sharing. Have you read Zelda Fitzgerald’s book, “Save Me The Waltz” ? Zelda Fitzgerald being F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife. It’s on my “TBR” list but it seems incredibly fascinating and also very much related to the genre of memoirs and books you’ve been reading/talking about here. I don’t know if it’s quite a memoir, but still, I recommend checking it out when/if you have time. And again, thank you for this post, it’s beautiful.