Marilyn Monroe’s Unpublished Poems: The Complex Private Person Behind the Public Persona – Brain Pickings

Did you ever begin Ulysses? Did you ever finish it? Marilyn Monroe (June 1, 1926–August 5, 1962) did both. She took great pains to be photographed reading or holding a book — insistence born not out of vain affectation but of a genuine love of literature. Her personal library contained four hundred books, including classics like Dostoyevsky and Milton, and modern staples like Hemingway and Kerouac. While she wasn’t shooting, she was taking literature and history night classes at UCLA. And yet, the public image of a breezy, bubbly blonde endures as a caricature of Monroe’s character, standing in stark contrast with whatever deep-seated demons led her to take her own life.

Source: Marilyn Monroe’s Unpublished Poems: The Complex Private Person Behind the Public Persona – Brain Pickings

Read Full Post »

Worth Reading

From Winter Garden

A novel by Kristin Hannah

Her children were on their own now. They would always be a family, but if she’d learned anything in the past it was that a family wasn’t a static thing. There were always changes going on. Like with continents, sometimes the changes were invisible and underground, and sometimes they were explosive and deadly. The trick was to keep your balance. You couldn’t control the direction of your family any more than you could stop the continental shelf from breaking apart. All you could do was hold on for the ride.

Read Full Post »