Genre: Historical Fiction
Length: 768 pages
Audiobook Length: 8 hours and 19 minutes
First Published: 1999
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Publisher’s Description
In one of her most ambitious works, Joyce Carol Oates boldly reimagines the inner, poetic, and spiritual life of Norma Jeane Baker—the child, the woman, the fated celebrity, and idolized blonde the world came to know as Marilyn Monroe. In a voice startlingly intimate and rich, Norma Jeane tells her own story of an emblematic American artist—intensely conflicted and driven—who had lost her way. A powerful portrait of Hollywood’s myth and an extraordinary woman’s heartbreaking reality, Blonde is a sweeping epic that pays tribute to the elusive magic and devastation behind the creation of the great 20th-century American star.
Quotes from Blonde
Death is just the last scene of the last act.
Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.
For what is delusion but the prelude to hurt. And what is hurt but the prelude to rage.
Her problem wasn’t she was a dumb blonde, it was she wasn’t a blonde and she wasn’t dumb.
About Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates is an author whose works include We Were the Mulvaneys, 48 Clues into the Disappearance of My Sister, Blonde, and the short story collection The (Other) You. She is a professor of humanities at Princeton University.
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