Nearly sixty years after her death, Marilyn Monroe remains a figure whom everyone loves but no one really knows. The conversations collected here help explore and explain that phenomenon, and offer insights into the unique type of fame and mystique that, to this day, belong to Monroe alone.

During her short life, Marilyn Monroe was globally revered as the sex symbol of the 1950s and 60s, and the originator of bombshell blonde image. Today we understand her better as someone keenly self-aware of the artiface involved in playing that part, and as a world-class actor poised to break out of the role that Hollywood assigned her. The conversations gathered here–spanning her emergence on the scene to just days before her death at age 36–show Monroe at her sharpest and most insightful on the thorny topics of ambition, fame, femininity, desire, and more. With an introduction from Sady Doyle that asks us to think of Monroe, not as tragic, but as righteously and justifiably angry, this collection offers a new look at a figure whom the media of the day, and our own assumptions about her and her type , have kept us from ever getting to know.