Some of the most personal correspondence that Marilyn Monroe wrote in her life, as well as the messages, both intimate and trivial, that she jotted for herself will be published for the first time in a book planned for the fall. On Tuesday, the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux said that it would release the book, called “Fragments,” in October, containing rare photographs of Monroe as well as reproductions of her typewritten and handwritten letters.
Courtney Hodell, an executive editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, said Monroe’s writing covered a wide range of subjects, including notes on the roles she was working on; exhortations to herself to become a better actress and lists of resolutions on how to do so; notes from her readings about Italian Renaissance art and how to decorate her apartment; and a recipe for stuffing.
There are also diary-style entries on Monroe’s relationship with Arthur Miller, as well as letters to her psychoanalysts and to Lee Strasberg, her friend and acting instructor, written when she was in the locked psychiatric ward of the Payne Whitney Clinic in New York.
“She’s trying to live the life of an artist and suffering a lot,” Ms. Hodell said in a telephone interview.
The book has happy moments as well, she said, but paints a portrait of Monroe “as being curious and questioning, and having this interior dialogue.”
“You get the sense she’s quite aware of her image,” she said. “But her sense of her true self is very different. That’s what comes through — she’s trying to arrive at the real Marilyn.”
Ms. Hodell said the letters in the book were part of the estate that Mr. Strasberg inherited after Monroe’s death in August 1962. The letters were given by Mr. Strasberg’s widow, Anna, to Stanley Buchthal, a family friend and adviser, and Bernard Comment, an editor at Editions du Seuil in Paris, to be compiled and edited for “Fragments.”
