Caitlin flanagan biography of barack

  • Born and raised in Berkeley, California, Flanagan earned a B.A. and an M.A. in art history from the University of Virginia.
  • Caitlin Flanagan is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
  • Seamus Heaney wrote Caitlin Flanagan a poem, on the occasion of her baptism as a child.

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    Inventing Marilyn

    Culture

    Anyone who thinks the story of Marilyn Monroe doesn't warrant such attention doesn't know much about it.

    By Caitlin Flanagan

    Thump—it landed on the doorstep last summer like an abandoned baby: the newest biography of Marilyn Monroe, a bouncing 515 pages and obviously loved. Tucked between its covers were 51 pages of footnotes, an 88-person list of interviewees, a four-page guide to abbreviations and “manuscript collections consulted.” Had it found a forever family? Sadly, no; it had been left at yet another hateful group home. After some mild bureaucratic processing—its publicity materials and padded mailer confiscated and tossed in the recycling bin, its well of familiar photographs perfunctorily ticked through—it ended up on a shelf crammed with other Marilyn bios, some tall and lovely and filled with pictures, others squat and densely written, a few handsomely published and seemingly important. It would have to find its place

  • caitlin flanagan biography of barack

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    Here are a few of the Joans I know. The girl who arrives at Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York feeling uneasy about her dress. The woman who rubs an ice cube against her lower back in a hotel room with a broken air-conditioning unit. The journalist who turns down acid offered to her by an interviewee. When I think of Joan Didion, I think of a packing list for a reporting trip that included bourbon and two skirts. And then the story of her husband reading her own book to her, cover to cover, as a birthday gift.

     

    Of course, I don’t know Joan Didion at all. She renders these images from her life so vividly, but then with sleight of hand she manages to obscure herself. What is Joan Didion like at a party? Does she move her hands as she speaks? Is she reserved? Funny? How did she act as a wife, as a mom?

     

    There’s a tendency to adopt a lofty tone when addressing Didion’s career. Presenting her with the National Humanities Medal in 2012, Barack Obama called her ‘one of

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