This is an interesting fiction/real life blend about the life and death of Marilyn Monroe. It appears to have pissed off many Monroe as well as Oates fans. Many who claim writer Oates was just bitter and jealous of Monroe's beauty, one reviewer going so far, after seeing Oates picture on the back cover, to say it was because "she'd been beaten with the ugly stick herself". Sheesh, talk about ugly people!I enjoyed the book even though it was pretty bleak and mostly depressing but how could it be

Oates's novel brings Marilyn back to life for a mind-numbing 700+ pages, a Lazarus style resurrection so tedious that never have I been so ready for the main character in a novel to just pack it in and die already. Oates is a talented writer. Fantastic, even. And yet...this book is flawed. Deeply flawed. For one, it is entirely too long. It's filled with sentences, paragraphs, and even whole chapters that add nothing to the book. They seem to exist solely for the purpose of Oates showing off her...

Read this, read this, read this!Fantastic writing. JCO brought Norma Jean/Marilyn to life is this factionalized version of her tumultuous life. I knew the major story lines of her life; her movie career, her short marriages to Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller and her dalliances with President Kennedy and RFK. I learned so much more about her life and her relationships. There were some interesting twists on what I knew to be her life, like her relationship to Cass Chaplin and Eddy G. Robinson Jr......

I think this may be JCO's masterwork. I would recommend to anyone with an appetite for long and literary books. It is typically darker than perhaps reality, given JCO's penchant for the dark side of things. So take that as a warning, Marilyn fans: this is her life through a glass darkly to be sure. After hearing some of the more recent accusations/accounts about JFK, it makes one lean toward JCO's dark lens on that particular relation. (Pages have come forward that they were made to service him,...

Blonde is the Fictionalized Biography of Marilyn Monroe. I chose to read it over a more conventional style biography because I thought it would thought would be a more personal account and show more of her character and personality. The book chronicles her life as a young child growing up with a mentally unstable mother and eventual placement in an orphanage and foster homes.We also see her transformation from the natural beauty Norma Jean Baker to the Sex Symbol Marilyn Monroe. Beneat...

Blonde is an epic and fictionalized account of Marilyn Monroe's life—it was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, and Oates herself has said that she expects this to be the novel for which she will ultimately be remembered.At over 700 pages, Blonde is incredibly ambitious in both length and scope as it follows Monroe's tumultuous life, from early childhood to the inevitable death. Don't expect it to be completely biographically accurate, though: A massive amount of rese...

YOU MUST READ THIS! Have to have to! And you will. It must be one of the BEST (FINEST) novels of all time. (& y'all know that this is the sole topic I will NEVER joke about.)Seeing the elusive, the ephemeral, through different filters--a jaguar prowling through the jungle, a baby left all alone, as if you had the privilege to do so in the first place. "Blonde" is a privilege to read-- the rarest of rare novel/poetry book combos. Why read itty bitty poetry in its refracted, basically restricted s...

Finally finished, wish I were still reading, all magic is gone from life now, pls advs.This is the New Feminist Text. I honestly think if every gal too young to remember (or too young to even have a mother who actively remembers the effects of) the women's movement of the 60s were given a copy of this book, we'd have much less patriarchy snackdom in the world, much more equal pay, and way fewer pointy-toed stilettos.Marilyn Monroe was continuously, systematically screwed over, pawned, and sucked...

My introduction to the fiction of Joyce Carol Oates is Blonde, a radically distilled accounting of the life and death of Norma Jeane Baker, who exploded onto screens (and magazine spreads) in 1950 as "Marilyn Monroe," became a global sex symbol and almost as quickly, exited the world in a drug overdose. Published in 2000, this is fiction, with characters of the author's invention mingling with real people (some unidentified by name). The word "epic" gets thrown about as an adjective far too ofte...

I have conflicting emotions about this book, and it goes something like this, “The book is about Marilyn, so what is there NOT to like about it, right? Warts and all, it is a powerful book written by a powerful writer.” But the song that keeps playing in my head, the words that keep haunting me, comes from the voice of another writer, This is the story of a rape.“This is the story of a rape, of the events that led up to it and followed it and of the place in which it happened. There are the acti...

This book was marvellous in many ways! It's a fictional piece of work following the life of Norma Jeane Baker, aka. Marilyn Monroe, from she's a child till her death as a 36-year-old woman devoured and intoxicated with drugs, medication and alcohol. It's a tragic life story, but it's hugely inspiring as well, and if you have even the faintest interest in Marilyn Monroe's life I would highly recommend this book. To me, one of the most interesting aspects of "Blonde" was how it balances fiction an...

I wasn't really sure how to go about reviewing this book at first, but then I came up with a solution, and it's a reviewing style I'll call The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.Here we go.The Good: Of course, Joyce Carol Oates is a scary-talented author and I bow at her feet. The writing in this book goes from staggeringly beautiful to heart-wrenchingly sad, and all of it is masterfully executed. The fact is, no matter what the following might say, I would probably give my left foot to be able to wri...

Joyce Carol Oates has appropriated our American wet dream, the winner of the global boner bracket, the all-time "Who'd You Rather?" champion, she's taken and made some kind of Cinderella Christ myth out of her, tarted up for the ball by her leering old fairy godfather and when the clock hits twelve martyred for our filthy sins. No soft-focus angel Christ here, either: this is Mel Gibson torture Christ, all meat and oozing sores inside her mouth. Oates insists on the fact of her body: Marilyn Mon...

For all of Blonde's claims as a novelized, feminist retelling of Marilyn Monroe's life, I have seldom come across a book with more disturbing, dehumanizing references to the female body and mind. I am aware that these are intended to further emphasize Marilyn's loathed and loved standing in the American psyche as the virgin/whore goddess/garbage dichotomy, but the painful overuse of the adjectives "cow", "cunt", and "mammalian" to describe Marilyn, as well as endlessly repetitive descriptions of...

Blonde provides a masterful, disturbing and perceptive characterization of Marilyn Monroe that coincides with all of the other information I have read about her but provides additional interpretation into her psyche through the guise of fiction. The book itself is impossible to describe as it takes on a stylistic form that is very specific and complex. This is not just someone randomly writing a fictional biography of Monroe. This is Joyce Carol Oates, one of the most prolific and important auth...