Please join us for a Q&A with Lynn Cullen, the author of the BookBrowse First Impressions selection, When We Were Brilliant. Lynn will be here to take your questions from August 3 through August 5. Please stop by!
Please help me welcome Lynn Cullen to the BookBrowse Community Forum. Her most recent novel, When We Were Brilliant, was a First Impressions pick earlier this year and received wide acclaim from our readers.
Lynn’s nationally and internationally bestselling novels have been translated into 17 languages and have received many honors, including the NPR Great Read, ALA Best Book of the Year, Oprah Book of the Week, People Magazine Book of the Week, and Indie Next Selection. She lives in Atlanta when not traveling to seek the unseen within the legends we thought we knew.
Please use this space to ask Lynn questions about her work. As a reminder, to reply to an existing comment, click the grey Reply on the right side under the comment. To ask a new question, click the blue Reply button a little lower down.
Lynn: Thank you so much for agreeing to chat with us. Before we jump into the Q&A, is there anything you’d like to share about yourself?
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Hello Kim and Book Browse community friends! (Book Browsers, if I may.) Thank you for inviting me in today. I’m delighted to be here and excited to talk about my books, writing, and life, with you.
I’m reminded of a word often used by Marilyn Monroe, one of the main characters in my novel, WHEN WE WERE BRILLIANT: Imagine! Norma Jeane Baker (or Mortensen, depending on the legal record—neither name was that of her real father) imagined a way out of her tragic past as an abandoned child by creating Marilyn Monroe. As Marilyn, Norma Jeane imagined her way into being a starlet, then into being a serious actress, then into becoming the most well-known woman in the world.
In real life, Marilyn used the word “imagine” often. I used her habit to guide me in understanding her for my novel, and then as an inspiration not just for my story, but for how to live one’s life. To imagine is to step outside of our lives and into the shoes of others. Imaging opens doors, embraces better possibilities, and encourages curiosity, the element, along with love, that is the secret to life.
Over the next three days, ask me anything you want about Marilyn or the only woman photographer for whom Marilyn sat, Eve Arnold. Your curiosity about these two trailblazing women and their world is the same one that drove me to write my book. I’ll be sharing some of Eve’s photos, as well as some of the amazing things I’ve learned during my four-decade career. It all goes back to one word: Imagine!
What a lovely intro, Lynn! Thanks for that.
I guess I’ll start us off! As you mention, When We Were Brilliant revolves around Marilyn Monroe and photojournalist Eve Arnold. I’ve seen in other interviews that you were inspired by Monroe after seeing her in The Seven Year Itch when you were eight. What made now the right time to tell her story, and Eve’s?
Also, what made you decide to approach Marilyn’s story through Eve’s eyes?
I’ve always wanted to understand Marilyn and hoped to write about her but I couldn’t figure out a unique way to tell her story until I stumbled across Eve Arnold. I had no idea when I started writing that my book would be finished in 2026, the year of Marilyn’s 100th birthday, so I stumbled into the worldwide centennial celebration of Marilyn, too. I guess a more elegant way of putting it is that discovering Eve and Marilyn at this time was serendipitous. It certainly was life-changing.
Tomorrow is the 64th anniversary of Marilyn’s death. Do you think about her often when important dates like that approach? Do you do anything special to commemorate the day?
Whenever I read books or articles about her, my main reaction is, “poor Marilyn!” She certainly didn’t have an easy time of it.
What part of her story was the most difficult to capture, and what part did you enjoy writing the most?
As for why I chose to tell my story through Eve’ Arnold’s eyes: Once I read about Eve and her pioneering photojournalism, and realized how important her work was in defining her era,
and I saw how her famous subjects always looked so different through her lens, I had to know more about her. I quickly saw that in Eve’s photos, Marilyn was sometimes unrecognizable. She looks so much younger and warmer and unguarded than in the hands of any other photographer. Interestingly, Marilyn sought out Eve. Their shoots were always Marilyn’s idea. She knew that Eve could portray a side of her that Marilyn showed no one else. And that side, I believe, is the true Norma Jeane. Eve’s specialty was showing the world the unseen and Marilyn knew this. She wanted Norma Jeane to be seen. That’s my novel in a nutshell!
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What challenges did you run into while writing Eve? Did you find one woman more difficult to write about than the other?
How did you go about researching Marilyn and Eve? I know you prefer to visit locations that were important to your subjects before you start writing about them. What venues did you visit for this book? What other research did you do in prep?
Marilyn’s life has always interested me much more than her death. For me, tomorrow will be a day of remembrance of this remarkable woman. Yes, Norma Jeane didn’t have an easy time of it, and still pretty much on her own she created Marilyn, a figure still adored to this day. Marilyn’s centennial is being celebrated in exhibitions around the world, and in them, her intelligence, wit, perseverance, talent, and kindness is coming to the forefront like never before. I had no idea when I was writing my book that this new appreciation of Marilyn would be the topic of worldwide discussion. Eve Arnold knew it all along, and wrote about it in her photo book MARILYN MONROE: AN APPRECIATION. For me to base a novel around it was pure serendipity.
Why do you suppose Marilyn in particular continues to have the adoration of the public so long after her death? There are plenty of glamorous stars who we remember today, but very few that are so beloved.
About the challenges I faced when writing about Eve: The woman was busy! I had to put together what she was doing in her career in tandem with Marilyn’s life. Much of Marilyn’s day to day life is well documented, it took more digging to know what Eve was doing. Fortunately, Eve provided a framework for my book with her own book MARILYN MONROE. It’s set up around their shoots together. I set up my book in the same fashion. But for all the action in the book not spent in their shoots, I had Eve’s other fifteen or so books to consult, and the interviews she gave over the years. I combed the internet for images of the events I knew that both women attended. I went to the places in my book where I set scenes, especially in New York.
Looking for Marilyn was a little easier. I read (and was often unsatisfied with) the myriad of biographies on her. I watched her films over and over. I studied her photos to the point where I can recognize the photographer by the side of herself she gave to them. I scoured the internet for interviews. It was fun work!
I think Marilyn is so beloved because she had the uncanny ability to project something that people could relate to in their own way. She made people feel like she was giving them something they alone could understand. And she had a deep need to be loved. Somehow she made herself vulnerable, made her yearning for our love palpable, and we feel this. We want to love her or protect her, or admire her and wonder at her–she draws out what we need drawing out. She fascinated Eve. Eve would spend the rest of her life looking for a subject who was so exhilarating to photograph. As Eve marveled in real life, “we were brilliant together.” Hence my title.
Greetings Lynn! Our fascination with MM never ends. I grew up in Southern California during the 1950s and we were always on the lookout for her and other celebrities. What do you think should be done about her home in Brentwood? Demolished or preserved as a cultural site?
Hi, Holly! Oh my goodness, did you ever see her?
I would have loved to have seen her, even as a kid. Now that I’ve spent so much time getting to know her, I actually pine for her. I really grew to adore her.
Her Brentwood home definitely should be preserved! She is a national treasure–why is her home not a museum? This home meant so much to Marilyn. She yearned for a family, having had none, and she yearned for a home. She was not wealthy–the studios underpaid her–so this was the only house she ever owned. She was in the process of furnishing it when she died. She’d gone furniture shopping on the day of her death. I do not believe, by the way, that her death was a suicide, nor that was she murdered. As Eve Arnold and her friends reported, she died accidentally of an overdose of sleeping pills.
Have you seen the Brentwood house?
I never saw her, sad to say. Whenever we had friends visiting from the east coast all they wanted to do was go to Disneyland and drive by MM’s house. And I agree on both points….preserve the house! and her death was accidental! It should have been a museum for all these years, like Hemingway’s house in Key West. Sad.
Good point–if Hemingway’s house was preserved, why not Marilyn? She was so important to our culture. Still is!
Did you drive by her Brentwood house as a kid, or one of the homes she rented or stayed in with friends? There’s a scene in my book at Milton Greene’s house in Bel Air, where Gordon Parks shot a photo of Marilyn that was so unusual that I had to write about it. It’s the “dirty girls” scene.