When We Were Brilliant, a Review by Susan

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When We Were Brilliant
Lynn Cullen
400 pages
Berkeley Publishing

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Anything that is about Marilyn Monroe will automatically get my attention.  I am fascinated by her, for reasons that I do not understand.  This novel is a fictional account of a friendship that develops between a photographer and Ms. Monroe.  The problem is that any historical fiction about a person like Marilyn Monroe never seems to quite meet my expectations.  This comes close and there are a number of good things about it.

The perspective in this novel is interesting.  It is totally from the photographer’s point of view but is written TO Ms. Monroe.  This has the effect of conveying a feeling of reverence to Ms. Monroe.  Since I think that this was the author’s intention, she was largely successful.  I say largely because while it does convince the reader that this photographer admired Ms. Monroe, it also somewhat minimized her own story, which was also of considerable interest and, to some extent, a major theme in the book.  As the book goes forward, the photographer’s marriage suffers because even though she has a relatively modern husband who encourages her to work, he begins to feel that he and their child were neglected.  In the 1950s, this is a very significant theme:  the battle between a woman’s home life and her success in the world, one that continues today.  I would have liked to have seen that a little more front and center and although we become aware of the narrator’s anger at her husband, I imagine that what she felt or should have felt was even more complex, especially since she had a child and there was very little in the novel about her role as a mother.

I was certainly interested in the subject matter and the history, even as it spent a good deal of time on Ms. Monroe’s husbands and relationships.  The pacing in the first half of the book was just a little slow; it picked up in the second half, which coincides with the dismantling of the narrator’s marriage.  While it did not quite live up to my expectations (nothing would), it was interesting and the second half, particularly, held my interest.

Thanks to NetGalley and to Berkeley Publishing for providing me with an advanced copy of this novel.  All of the opinions expressed herein are my own.