Marilyn Monroe's unpublished writings reveal the artist behind the icon

The book 'Fragments' (Seuil, coll. Fiction & Cie) collects Marilyn Monroe's personal writings—poems, notes, and letters—published in full for the first time. Edited by Anna Strasberg and Stanley Buchthal, the volume includes over thirty photographs by André de Dienes, Cecil Beaton, and Richard Avedon. The writings, spanning from 1943 to 1962, show Monroe as a voracious reader of Whitman, Beckett, Kerouac, and Joyce, and as a dedicated actress training at the Actor's Studio under Lee and Paula Strasberg. Her texts reveal her struggles with body image, her fear of madness (her mother and grandmother were institutionalized), and her painful psychiatric hospitalization. In a 1961 letter to Dr. Ralph Greenson, she writes of reading Freud's correspondence and says, 'I know I will never be happy, but I can be gay!' The cover photograph by André de Dienes captures her tragic beauty. Antonio Tabucchi's preface describes her as an 'intellectual and artistic personality' unsuspected by most. Arthur Miller called her 'a poet on the street corner trying to recite verses to a crowd that tears her clothes off.' The book offers an intimate portrait of Monroe as a complex, intelligent woman and committed artist.