In the early 1950s, a photographer named Eve Arnold arrived on a film set to shoot a young actress between takes and found her sitting alone in a corner, reading. The book was Ulysses. Arnold assumed it was a prop, or a pose, and said so later. She was wrong. Marilyn Monroe had been working her way through Joyce with the same ferocious private determination she brought to her acting classes at the Actors Studio, the same hunger that had driven her to haunt libraries as a child in foster care and devour books that nobody expected a girl who looked like her to be reading. The distance between what the world saw when it looked at Marilyn Monroe and what was actually there had been the defining condition of her life almost from the beginning, and it did not narrow as the fame grew. It widened. By the time the white dress billowed over the subway grate and the image became one of the most reproduced photographs of the 20th century, the woman inside the frame had become almost entirely invisible, hidden in plain sight behind the most recognizable face in the world.
When we imagine Marilyn Monroe, we imagine an image, or rather a cascade of images, each one so perfectly composed that it seems less like a photograph than a myth made visible. The platinum curls, the perfect pout, the luminous fragility that made audiences feel simultaneously protective and voyeuristic: these are the visual grammar of a celebrity so total that it eventually consumed the person who generated it. But Marilyn Monroe was also Norma Jeane Mortenson, a girl who grew up through foster homes and institutional care, who educated herself in secret, who fought with ferocious intelligence and discipline for a career the industry was always trying to reduce to a body, and who spent her brief adult life searching, with increasing desperation, for a place where she could simply exist without being looked at.
It is that Norma Jeane, the woman behind the image, whom Aubrey Malone sets out to recover in The Marilyn Diaries, a fictional memoir arriving at a charged cultural moment. Monroe's centenary in 2026 has prompted a long overdue reassessment of her life and legacy, one that moves beyond the tabloid tragedy narrative and the reductive iconography to ask more honest and more uncomfortable questions about what her story actually tells us: about fame, about the machinery of the studio system, about the particular cruelties visited on women who were simultaneously desired and dismissed, and about our own persistent fascination with a life that ended at 36 and has never quite stopped haunting us.
Aubrey Malone is an Irish author with a long and distinguished engagement with cinema and popular culture, whose previous works include The Elvis Diaries and numerous biographies of film stars. With The Marilyn Diaries, he has crafted something at once tender and unsettling, inhabiting Monroe's imagined inner voice with enough fidelity to the historical record and enough imaginative courage to move beyond it. The diary entries he has constructed are intimate and unguarded, giving readers access to a woman who seemed to belong to everyone but herself and who, underneath the performance, was always looking for a way home. We sat down with Malone to discuss the making of the book, the delicate balance of fact and imagination it requires, and why Marilyn Monroe, more than six decades after her death, still has something urgent left to say.
Charles Carlini: What first inspired you to write The Marilyn Diaries as a fictional diary rather than a more conventional biography? Was there a particular moment, image, or story of Marilyn’s life that made you think the diary form would be the best way to capture her spirit?
Aubrey Malone: I felt the diary format would capture her spirit best because direct speech hits you in a way that third-person narration can’t. And even if these diaries are fictional, they’re grounded in fact. Sydney Smith, the celebrated English clergyman and essayist, once called fiction “licensed lying,” but in that suspension of disbelief, we can sometimes reach a higher truth.
There was no single moment that convinced me the diary format was right. The idea came partly from the sheer number of Marilyn biographies already out there—writing another one felt like bringing coals to Newcastle. I wanted to do something different for her centenary in 2026, so I began thinking “outside the box.” I knew she had written a short autobiography early in her career with screenwriter Ben Hecht, and I thought I could build on that. Some years ago, I wrote The Elvis Diaries, which now feels like a kind of precursor—both Elvis and Marilyn are icons recognized by first name alone.
I don’t think they ever met. Marilyn was more than a decade older, which probably ruled out any romantic connection, but their career arcs were strikingly similar. Both shot to fame so quickly they became too famous for their own good, and both faced the kind of breakdowns that such fame often brings.
Elvis once planned to write his autobiography, which he intended to call Through My Eyes. I wanted to do something similar for Marilyn, to see the world through her eyes—from her poignant childhood to the dizzying years when she became the quintessential sex symbol of her time. For me, the book is ultimately a cautionary fable for anyone who thinks fame and fortune equal happiness. We all know the King Midas story: be careful what you wish for.
CC: How did you decide where to draw the line between historical fact and imaginative invention? Were there particular sources you found indispensable, and moments when you felt the burden of letting “what might have been” fill in the gaps of “what is known”?
AM: The foundation of a book like this is, of course, “what is known.” Once that’s established, you can go wherever you like. Writing a semi-fictional diary is a mix of total discipline and total freedom. The discipline is more demanding than biography, where you can glide over months and even years as needed. I didn’t expend too much space on Marilyn’s very early years, but once she began to be known, I was scrupulous about pinning events to exact dates.
As for sources, one of the most valuable I found was a book listing the key dates of Marilyn’s life and the events that happened on them. That gave me a framework. The “freedom” came in the spaces between those dates, where I could imagine how she might have felt about an event, a person, a film—whatever was happening around that time. This was the most enjoyable part of the process, where imagination takes over.
I allowed myself to be more outrageous in The Elvis Diaries than here. In that book, I had Elvis play Russian roulette when Priscilla left him, and later make secret trips to Tupelo to watch his old home from a distance and weep. Those things never happened, but they “might” have. Fiction, as someone once said, is the art of the possible.
For Marilyn, I gave myself poetic license to imagine what she might have been feeling on the way to a modeling session, an audition, or a date. That’s the beauty of the diary form: you’re creating a private self the public never saw, one who confides everything to her diary. Except now, of course, the whole world is reading over her shoulder.
CC: Marilyn Monroe is so extensively documented—films, interviews, biographies, photos. How did you develop the “voice” of Norma Jeane/Marilyn in the diary entries so that it feels authentic, yet personal and interior? Were there literary models or other diaries that shaped your approach?
AM: Two other Marilyn diaries have been published in the past. The stronger of the two only covers the last year of her life. The other was written by a man who also authored a biography of her, and that’s where it falters—you can hear the biographer’s voice intruding. He uses “big words,” the words of a writer rather than Marilyn herself, and it immediately jars.
Ernest Hemingway once said, “Just because I don’t use the ten-dollar words doesn’t mean I don’t know them.” Sometimes the two-dollar words say more. You have to write “down” rather than “up.” Simplicity is the key to truth, especially when writing about the Norma Jeane years. If the reader senses you’re showing off, it’s like going off-key in a song—you lose credibility. I bought both books before beginning my own, but I didn’t open them until I’d finished. I knew they would interfere with the voice I was trying to find.
I didn’t consult any other diaries for guidance either; that would have been unnecessary. It was Marilyn’s voice I was after, no one else’s. Once I found it, the book practically wrote itself. An author, like an actor, has to put on the right costume to inhabit the character. For a writer, the costume is vocabulary and style. I’ve written several first-person novels, and those narrators were not me—I was taking on an alter ego. Developing that “anti-self” prepared me for this book, especially my novel A Nursing Life, where I wrote from a woman’s perspective about her experiences in hospitals. Writing about something as intimate as childbirth forces you to imagine and understand women more deeply.
CC: The premise includes Norma Jeane’s childhood in the 1930s, foster homes, and abandonment. How did writing these early years influence your understanding of her later choices and public persona? Did you discover things in the research that surprised or unsettled you?
AM: I didn’t need to do extensive research for this book; I’ve been writing about Marilyn in one manner or another for decades. Most people know the basic facts of her life, even if they’re not film scholars. Her childhood in orphanages and foster homes is the “elephant in the room” of her fame, shaping everything that came after. She may have changed her name from Norma Jeane to Marilyn, but she could never shed the identity of that lonely child. The person she was as a girl remained with her as the woman the world came to know—even down to her habit of keeping people waiting. She once admitted this might have been a subconscious revenge for all the times she waited for people who never came to fetch her from the foster homes.
One of the most unsettling things I learned about her childhood was that her maternal grandmother, Della Mae, reportedly tried to suffocate her with a pillow when she was just a year old. After arranging Marilyn’s stay with the Bolenders, the first family who took her in, Della Mae was committed to a psychiatric institution. Marilyn lived her whole life afraid she would end up in one too. Near the end of her life, she did spend a few days in a psychiatric ward because of a misunderstanding, an experience that shook her badly. She believed mental illness was hereditary; the fact that both her grandmother and her mother suffered from it left her convinced she was next. Though she was never mentally ill, the fear of it haunted her, fueling her depression and contributing to multiple suicide attempts.
There were other deeply unsettling aspects to her early life. Her first marriage, to Jim Dougherty, was one of convenience, meant to spare her a return to foster care. Later, she became a victim of the casting couch and endured sexual abuse from powerful men like film studio executive Joseph Schenck. In the pre-#MeToo era, she accepted the fact that this was simply the price women paid if they wanted to succeed.
CC: One of the themes in your description is the loneliness that grows with fame. In your work, how do you portray the tension between Marilyn’s desire for visibility and her longing for refuge or anonymity? Is that the central conflict you see in her life?
AM: I think this is the central conflict in any famous person’s life, but especially Marilyn’s. As I’ve said, she remained a little girl in many ways all her life, and that’s part of what we love about her. Arthur Miller once described her as a child crying at a street corner, and she never outgrew that image—no matter how many klieg lights shone in her face or how famous she became. There is nowhere lonelier than being on a city street surrounded by hundreds of people. Marilyn once said, “You can’t snuggle up to a career on a cold Monday night.”
As her fame grew, the attention became relentless. Eventually, she seemed to be stalked by paparazzi every waking moment, and even in some sleeping ones. In the early part of her career, she welcomed the attention, but it eventually became suffocating. When her life was no longer her own, fame became a kind of prison and a factor in her downfall.
Someone once said that the paradox of celebrity is that nobodies go to the ends of the earth to become somebodies, only to be nobodies again once the allure wears off. But the rollercoaster doesn’t run backwards—you can’t become “unfamous.” Tony Curtis once told his daughter Jamie Lee, as her star began to rise, “Remember, this stuff doesn’t go away. It’s there forever on celluloid and in video.” Henny Youngman put it more wryly: people who craved fame before they had it end up wearing dark glasses to avoid being recognized. In that sense, fame is a poisoned chalice. You never quite know who to trust, because friends might be cashing in on you or using you for their own ends.
CC: Marilyn Monroe remains a myth as much as a person. How did you approach writing entries that engage with how Marilyn was perceived, what was projected on her, versus what she might have felt internally? How do you think she understood the myth around her, and did she ever embrace it on her own terms?
AM: She once remarked that men who saw her in provocative poses had unseemly thoughts and then projected such thoughts onto her. She was a far wiser woman than we often give her credit for, fully aware of the gap between the person and the myth. What she never seemed to master was how to live with that gap. Had she done so, it might not have become so unbearable by the end of her life.
The real secret of surviving mythic status is not to believe your own publicity. Elvis used to say, “Cut me and I bleed. I put my legs into my trousers one at a time.” Film director Sidney Lumet once joked about Paul Newman, “I lost all respect for him when I realized he had to go to the bathroom.” Marilyn, I think, could never be so casual about existing in the stratosphere of fame. That inability is part of what ultimately consumed her.
CC: Your writing is described as “haunting,” “lyrical,” “raw.” How much of The Marilyn Diaries was about finding the right emotional texture, not only what she thought, but how she felt, and what language might approximate that feeling? Did writing “through” diary entries present stylistic challenges?
AM: The style I wanted was Marilyn’s own personality, and all its vicissitudes. She once wrote in a poem that the world was coming too near, and I wanted to capture that sense of desperation in a way she herself might have expressed it. The diary format is naturally staccato—like a jump cut in a film—and that felt right for Marilyn, whose mind was often in turmoil. If she were alive today, I suspect she might be diagnosed with ADHD.
She frequently drove directors mad by forgetting lines or cues, particularly after falling under the influence of Lee Strasberg and his wife Paula, who replaced Natasha Lytess as her drama coach. She joined the Actors Studio in the fifties to take her career in a more serious direction. Some have argued that in doing so, she lost what made her special. I wouldn’t go that far, but the shift in focus certainly unsettled her mind. The diary format seemed the perfect way to reflect that disruption.
Jack Lemmon once said of Marilyn, “If a building she was in was falling down, she’d probably run in the opposite direction to everyone else. She’d go the wrong way—but she’d still get out.” That contrarian instinct—what T.S. Eliot called the dissociation of sensibility at the heart of the modern mind—was part of her unique survival mechanism. In the style of these diary entries, I’ve tried to capture the way she fused that survival instinct with a simultaneous drive toward self-destruction. By the end of her life, she was still running the “wrong” way, as Lemmon put it—but no longer escaping.
CC: In reimagining someone so famous and often portrayed as fragile or victimized, how did you try to preserve or expose her agency? Where did you resist common narratives or clichés about Marilyn, and where did you feel you had no choice but to lean into what existing sources suggest?
AM: I avoid all the familiar wisdom about Marilyn in the book, whether from her or from those who knew her. Including those oft-quoted remarks, clever as they might be, would have turned the project into just another biography in disguise. I’m proud to say I own a copy of Marilyn Monroe In Her Own Words, and not a single one of those words appears in my book. If the Marilyn of lore showed up, the Marilyn I was creating would have vanished.
As for the second part of your question—the mixture of fragility and agency in her personality—that's one of the most fascinating things about her and what makes her so compelling to write about. Let’s not forget she founded her own company, Marilyn Monroe Productions, and was a shrewd negotiator when it came to salaries, grosses, and all the details of running a business. In that sense, she was a steel magnolia—or, to borrow Jack Nicholson’s description of Jessica Lange, “a fawn crossed with a Buick.”
Billy Wilder bristled at the idea of Marilyn as a victim. He saw her agency more clearly than most. Working with her, he said, was like going to the dentist—lovely when it was over. Wilder, the only director to work with her twice, joked that he deserved a Purple Heart for the experience. Both films he made with her were difficult for her. In The Seven Year Itch, he filmed the iconic air-vent scene that she later said killed her marriage to Joe DiMaggio. By the time she appeared in Some Like It Hot, her second collaboration with Wilder, her nerves were frayed. She was struggling to conceive with Arthur Miller and hated playing another “dumb blonde.” Today, we see the film as her most iconic, but it was grueling for Wilder and, to a lesser extent, for Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis.
Whether we can call it victimization or simply the cost of fame, by then the pressure was crushing her. In this period, we can see both sides of Marilyn most clearly: the strong-willed protagonist and the fragile victim. Fame had become her two-headed Hydra.
CC: Without spoiling too much, how did you approach the final entries? The death of Marilyn is itself shrouded in public fascination, rumor, and pain. What was your intention in how you depict her final days, and what do you want readers to take away about her legacy—both the myth and the woman?
AM: The entries become more detailed as the book goes on. Some years ago, I wrote a study of The Misfits, and the research I did for that project gave me deep insights into Marilyn’s state of mind as her marriage to Arthur Miller unraveled. I also discovered a book that included diary entries tied to exact dates from that year of her life, which was an extraordinary resource. Being able to anchor events so precisely allowed me to trace, step by step, the way her mind began to fray as she approached the end of her life.
In The Elvis Diaries, I ended with the “King” falling from his “throne” in mid-sentence, a nod to Finnegans Wake, to show him dying of natural causes rather than in the lurid ways conspiracy theorists imagined. With Marilyn, the approach had to be more nuanced. I won’t spoil the ending, save to say that I wanted to leave her death suspended in that same space of uncertainty it occupies in public memory. Did she take her own life? Was it an accident? None of us can know, unless we were there that night. Conspiracy theories have placed Peter Lawford and Robert Kennedy at the scene or imagined elaborate cover-ups involving narcotic-laced enemas and the removal and return of her body. I avoided all of that. My only focus was on the state of her mind.
If you wish to call it suicide, that’s fair. She had just been fired from a film, there was no man in her life, and she feared her career and figure were slipping away. But that isn’t the whole story. She was re-hired for Something’s Got to Give and given a raise shortly before her death, though by then her spirit seemed too broken to take much comfort from it.
At the same time, Elizabeth Taylor was at the pinnacle of her fame, earning a record-breaking $1 million for Cleopatra. She even phoned Marilyn one night to commiserate over her troubles on Something’s Got to Give. Studio executives complained that Hollywood couldn’t afford both an Elizabeth Taylor and a Marilyn Monroe—both accused of unpunctuality, “creative difficulty,” and poor health. By this point, Marilyn seemed like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, waving to a parade that had already passed her by.
It’s like the old joke about the four stages of fame:
- Who is Marilyn Monroe?
- Get me Marilyn Monroe.
- Get me a Marilyn Monroe lookalike.
- Who is Marilyn Monroe?
CC: What drew you to return to another cultural icon after The Elvis Diaries? Why does Marilyn Monroe still matter so deeply in 2025, and what conversations about gender, fame, mental health, or identity does her life still open up? What do you hope readers will feel differently after reading The Marilyn Diaries?
AM: Marilyn matters in 2025 because she has mattered every year since her death. The sheer flood of books and films about her are proof enough, and with her centenary next year, there will likely be even more. Her life opens up questions about toxic masculinity that remain urgent in the age of Harvey Weinstein, as well as about the perils of celebrity itself, an era that has claimed so many others, from Brittany Murphy and Heath Ledger to Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robin Williams.
I’ve tried to bring an elegiac tone to her story, to help readers understand the demons she wrestled with for years, the ones that eventually overpowered her. Just as there was no Betty Ford Clinic for Elvis' addiction to food and prescription drugs, there was no effective treatment for Marilyn’s depression. Her psychiatrist, Ralph Greenson, was away when she died, and some have claimed he was more interested in her celebrity than her suffering. Over time, he became as much a social companion as a counselor. Marilyn loved being invited to his home and spending time with his children, perhaps because she had none of her own. In that simple image of her sitting at another man’s table, we glimpse the circle of her life: the lonely child from the orphanage still searching for a place where she belonged.
Her fear of being institutionalized, her inability to carry a pregnancy to term, her mismatched marriages, her lovers’ betrayals, and the constant sexual objectification by studio bosses all speak to a deep sickness at the heart of the industry she worked so hard to conquer. And then there are the dissenting voices. Billy Wilder, for one, objected to the deification of Marilyn after her death. “It isn’t Hollywood that killed Marilyn Monroe,” he said, “It’s the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.” Others trivialized her legacy with quips like, “She made it to the top because her dresses didn’t.” This, too, is part of her fascination—that she still provokes such wildly divergent views. For years to come, we will continue to argue about who she was and what she represented, as she tried to transform herself from “cheesecake” to serious actress.
Arthur Miller was supposed to help guide that transformation by writing her a complex, demanding role in The Misfits. He did, but she ultimately found the script too exposing, too much like an anatomy of her own private pain. She came to feel he had used her vulnerability to launch his screenwriting career.
Perhaps the last word should be Miller’s own, from Death of a Salesman, about his most famous creation, Willy Loman: “Attention must be paid.”
Readers can pre-order The Marilyn Diaries now and be among the first to experience Aubrey Malone’s intimate reimagining of Marilyn Monroe’s life.
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