| The story of Marilyn Monroe “has entered the realm of myth,” the culture critic Daphne Merkin observed in The New Yorker, in 1999. Monroe’s transmutation took place decades ago, but the actress was also, for thirty-six years, a flesh-and-blood human being—and, under other circumstances, might still be alive, celebrating her ninety-seventh birthday tomorrow. Instead, most of us know the outlines of her life and death: the bombshell curves and breathy whisper; the flashes of onscreen brilliance and behind-the-scenes disarray; the unhappy marriages and eventual overdose. Merkin surveys the ever proliferating literature about Monroe, who was born in a California charity ward to a mentally unwell mother and a father of uncertain identity. After circulating in and out of foster care for much of her childhood, and possibly being molested by a boarder during a stretch at her mother’s house, she achieved superstardom in her mid-twenties, but not the stability she had been deprived of early on. Merkin examines the alluring contradictions of Monroe’s image—her status as “one of the few babes to be drawn to brainy men,” the paralyzing insecurity beneath the glamorous façade—and considers the “curiously dangling threads” of her death, a source of conjecture and conspiracy theories from the day her body was discovered. Another quarter century onward, her legend and its mysteries remain. “We will never have enough of Monroe,” Merkin writes, “because there is never sufficient explanation for the commotions of her soul.” | 
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