Blonde: A Novel

Joyce Carol Oates is a seasoned writer, having authored more than 70 books of poetry, gothic fiction, and biography. In Blonde, she explores one of the 20th century’s most famous figures, Marilyn Monroe. In an attempt to further humanize her subject and project her in an empathetic light, she presents a work of fiction rather than biography, which allows Oates to condense numerous historical figures into one fictional character while also creating details to reimagine the motivations and traumas of the historical Norma Jean Baker.

Oates has won many writing awards, and Blonde was considered for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Journalist Elaine Showalter states that Oates developed the plot of Blonde after seeing a photograph of teenage Norma Jeane Baker winning a beauty pageant; she appeared innocent—the opposite of the iconic representation of Marilyn Monroe as a confident bombshell (Showalter, Elaine. “Joyce Carol Oates’s ‘Blonde’ Is the Definitive Study of American Celebrity.” The New Yorker, 3 April 2020). Showalter writes that Norma Jeane actually encompasses three different identities: Norma Jeane, Marilyn Monroe, and the Blonde. In Elaine Showalter’s introduction to the 20th-anniversary edition of Blonde, she writes that Oates considered Blonde to be her Moby Dick, as she sought to build an entire