Product Description

'Nothing lasts forever.we all have a short time, to shine or just survive.' Who was Marilyn Monroe? She began as Norma Jeane, the Los Angeles waif who dreamed of being a movie star. The camera worshipped her, and she became America's greatest sex symbol. For thirty-six years, she dazzled the world with her fragile, but radiant beauty. In private, she yearned for fulfilment. Her myth shone so brightly that it threatened to destroy her. Then, one night in 1962, she left us in mystery. The Mmm Girl:Mariyln Monroe, by herself, follows the journey of a self-made goddess, from the orphanage to the silver screen. By standing in her shoes, Tara Hanks uncovers the reality of Marilyn's life - as she might have told it herself.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1194557 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 348 pages

Customer Reviews

Marilyn's Heart
It's been done before, an author stepping in to create an autobiography for one who is no longer alive to tell their own story. In Marilyn Monroe's case, this approach was most famously taken by Norman Mailer with his 1980 Of Women and Their Elegance, when he tired to make things right after the insinuations he had relied upon for his first attempt at capturing Monroe in 1973's Marilyn. Ben Hecht with Milton Greene's help used Marilyn's voice as well when they attempted to "flesh out" Marilyn's own attempt at telling her story, the aptly named My Story. And in 1999 Charles Casillo took the approach when he created for print the infamous "red diary" with his The Marilyn Diaries. So the question might be asked why another author would take this well-traveled road in telling the Monroe story. The answer, for me at least, is that try as they might, not one of the above had the combination of empathy, talent, and, for want of a better word, a female perspective, to come close to realizing what Marilyn Monroe herself may have had to say about her life and times. While each of the prior attempts had their merits, not one was able to catch the ethereal spirit behind the woman who has now been gone for so long yet is still so vividly alive in the national (and international) consciousness. Compared to Tara Hanks' The Mmm Girl, even Marilyn's own My Story comes in second place.

Hanks' earlier work, Wicked Baby, the story of Christine Keeler and the Profumo Affair, showed that the author had the eye for detail needed to recreate a past era and the talent to present the emotional background of a woman caught in the headlights of publicity. Yet as fine as that work was, it was so slim a volume that the reader was left far too quickly wishing there were more. With The Mmm Girl, Hanks proves that she not only has talent but has gained the confidence required to tell the full story, no matter what the subject. And here she has taken on one of the most complex stories of modern times, the intricate and much guessed at emotional state of one of the world's best known and most controversial individuals. While others have told the story in countless times before and while the tale has been retold so often via mediocre made for TV excursions, one would think that most everyone on the planet not only knows the story by heart but has grown weary of hearing it. Yet when reading The Mmm Girl, one can not help but realize that all previous attempts never quite got it - that elusive something special that made Monroe so incredibly unique. So does Hanks "get it"? Does he nail down the chimera that was Monroe? No one living will ever know for certain but for those who have come to their own personal understanding of Monroe's character and tale, for perhaps the very first time they will now be able to find "their Marilyn" right there in print, all of her thoughts and actions captured in book form.

In the past I have often emphasized the merit of a Marilyn book lies with the author having actually have known their subject in person. Susan Strasberg, Norman Rosten, WJ Weatherby, even Eunice Murray all seem to have successfully captured Marilyn while others, even if exceedingly talented, such as Norman Mailer, Donald Spoto or Michael Korda, conjure only a ghost of what was. This isn't always the case, of course. Michelle Morgan's Private and Undisclosed works its magic because she was able to ferret out those who had personal memories that had not been shared. Fred Lawrence Guiles' Norma Jean worked because the memories were so fresh and he had an obvious affection for the late star.

Yet others who did know Marilyn failed when they attempted to recreate thoughts or conversations and the result was either disappointing or at times vulgar. Lena Pepitone is a case in point. If you believe Ted Jordan, his would be, like Robert Slatzer's, yet another. And if one is to consider why someone like Pepitone, who did have first hand experience failed where Hanks succeeds, one has to realize that it really does come down to something as simple as heart. Not once in Pepitone's book does one feel a true empathy. And yet Tara Hanks, who had never met Marilyn Monroe, let alone interviewed her or shared time with her, succeeds so far beyond other authors simply because she set out not to write a tell all bestseller or to publish fodder for a future TV movie. She set out to share what no one had been able to do in the past: Marilyn's own feelings about her life. The result is not hackneyed, nor is it a sob story worthy of an E! Entertainment treatment. If one takes one's subject seriously, if one gives actual thought to the story and tries to imagine, knowing what they do of Monroe's character and personality, how she would react to the many now well known episodes of her life, the result will satisfy even the most hardened and skeptical of Monroe fans.

Here's the bottom line: By this point the Monroe story is so well known that nearly anyone could sit down in front of their computer and churn out a recitation of the woman's life. But it takes not only talent but heart to tell the story right. Tara Hanks has both.

"The Mmm Girl" -- A Haunting Experience
Review of :"The Mmm Girl" (Marilyn Monroe, by herself ...) By Tara Hanks,2007 UKA Press
By Stuart Coates

When I went searching for something new, fresh and different to read about Marilyn Monroe, I did not have to think very hard or seek very far. I knew of a novel that had been written by Tara Hanks that would easily fulfill all of the above.

"The Mmm Girl" is a fictional auto-biography, as told in the first person, by the character of Norma Jeane Baker (Mortenson), later better known by her more famous name of Marilyn Monroe.
The novel is divided into four parts, in all, consisting of 37 chapters. The story is chronological. The opening chapters deal with Marilyn's early life as a young child (then known as Norma Jeane) and progresses with Norma Jeane as the narrator up until the very last conscious moment of her life on an August night in 1962.
The fact that the book is written in the first person, while the actual author, Hanks, did not personally meet
Marilyn Monroe or the younger Norma Jeane Mortenson intrigued me.

Could the author actually tell a fictional account of this now very well known person and make her character in the novel feel real? I got my answer and, as the title to this piece will tell you, it was a haunting experience for me!
The character of Norma Jeane/Marilyn is brought out vividly in a most effective way. The character feels real. In fact, this is the most effective work on Marilyn Monroe I have ever read in all of 31 years.

The writing flows as a very well-constructed, well-thought out story -- not as a recital of mere facts inter-spruced with narrative as filler, but a truly fluid read that will keep the reader glued to the novel's pages.
One will quickly become connected to the narrator, Norma Jeane/Marilyn, herself, as they turn the pages. The novel has 344 pages but it will read more like 200.

Did Hanks create a novel that gets the setting and the environment correct of the time in history in which Marilyn grew up? The answer, again, is yes. Painstakingly, yes! An enormous amount of time, effort and love went into this novel by Hanks and it is immediately apparent after reading only the opening pages.

I must admit, the character's story-telling is so much as if Marilyn herself were telling it that, already knowing (roughly) how the story would end, about 70 pages into the novel, I jumped to the last chapter to see how this character's description of her own final moments of life would be handled. I became curious -- more than curious -- to see if this same first-person telling of Monroe's life would be carried out consistently to the very end.
Here is my skepticism concerning how the ending would be handled:

At the quarter-mark of the novel, I had been fully drawn in by Hanks masterful writing style. Surely, Hanks wouldn't be able to relay that account in the first person and make it convincing! She got the character down so well in her writing for the first quarter of the book. To be truthful, I had to find out. I turned to that last chapter and read it. This was the part of the novel that I indeed found haunting.

The impact of that final chapter will be a lasting one for me. "The Mmm Girl" has now left an indelible series of images in my memory. This is the only book written on Marilyn Monroe I have read that has ever done this to me. The description of what happens in that final chapter is so convincing that I am almost certain this is exactly what was going through Marilyn's mind the last night she was alive in her bedroom in her Brentwood home.
When I returned back to where I had jumped from in the novel and began reading again, I saw the gradual acceleration of her life unfold to that haunting ending. It riveted me to the story.

Other authors have told this story in their biographies, but I have always felt somewhat disconnected from Marilyn, herself, adding to the enigma surrounding her death and I have come away from their books unsatisfied, wanting.
Although this is a fictional work, "The Mmm Girl" has finally left me with a lasting, haunting series of images of what the last hours of Marilyn's life would have been like had I been there in her home on that particular night many, many years ago. And I felt the very same empathy for the Marilyn-character portrayed in this novel.
To me, this novel is more accurate, in many ways, than anything else that has been written about Marilyn and it is the ONLY book to ever leave me with a lasting impression of the loneliness and desperation of her real life.
As a point of criticism, at one point in the book, an enormous number of minor characters enter the story. I thought, initially, this had a tendency to bog down the story.

"This is getting too cluttered," I was beginning to think to myself as I read through it, but upon further reflection it made perfect sense. All of these minor characters -- although prominent in Marilyn's life for the moment -- were actually transient for her. None of them were really going to be there for any prolonged period of time. They were necessary for properly getting the facts correct, but they had no lasting value to her or the story.
If you were a complete new-comer to learning about Monroe and if the reader, like me, has no interest in these other people with whom she associated, you might start to feel overwhelmed.

My advice to a novice Monroe reader is to keep your focus on the narrator, Marilyn, through the story and simply observe how the minor characters keep changing around her as the story progresses.

When I became aware of the rate at which new characters were introduced and then just as quickly, faded from the story, everything started to fit together. These minor characters are like the nuts and bolts (most of the "nuts" in a different sense of the word) holding the story together.

None of these minor characters lasted in Marilyn's life. The same must be said about her actual life. Take away the nuts and bolts of a structure and it collapses. Take away all those who transiently supported her as a human being and she collapsed, too. The horrible thing about this is a building can be brought to the ground and reconstructed, whereas a human being cannot. With the exception of friends like Joe DiMaggio and Shelley Winters, the rest of them really weren't there for this woman!

This is a rather astounding statement to make, but if you really want to know about the person of Marilyn Monroe instead of just the statistics about her career -- this fictional telling of her life, "The Mmm Girl", is your very best bet out there, in this reader's opinion.

Furthermore, unlike other books I have on Marilyn Monroe, this one won't be gathering any dust. I will be re-reading this story many times over. And each time, I know I will be finding out something new about the actual person. "The Mmm Girl" is just the book to do this. It differs from all other Marilyn books for me. It held my interest and I was left with some lasting images throughout the book, which is more than I can say for every other book out there on Marilyn Monroe.

Hanks has added something completely new and of value to Marilyn Literature. Marilyn Monroe died many years ago, but she still lives within the pages of her novel -- "The Mmm Girl".

[...]
(Tara's own website, well worth the visit)

For anyone wishing to learn who Marilyn Monroe (Norma Jeane Mortenson) really was -- what she experienced and how she thought, this is the book to purchase!

It's well worth it!

Stuart Coates, author of "Norma Jeane's Wishes in Time"

Norma Jeane's Wishes in Time: (A Four Part Adventure)