Review: The Mmm Girl by Tara Hanks

There can’t be very many people who don’t know at least something about Marilyn Monroe. If you consult any of the scores of biographies written about her, her rags-to-riches story will unfold in front of you: the girl born into poverty as Norma Jeane Mortensen, the orphanage and series of foster homes following her mother’s admission to a psychiatric hospital, the string of romantic disappointments and the uncertainty of trying to build a career in one of the most fickle places on earth – Hollywood. The Mmm Girl is not another biography, but neither does it reinvent its heroine for the 21st Century, or omit details from Marilyn’s tragic yet fascinating life.

Hanks’s Marilyn Monroe is a woman of her time. She is a talented actress with a quick wit and impeccable comic timing, typecast as an airhead and a bimbo. A determined career woman who also wants desperately to find love and have a family, only to have both these goals thwarted by a series of troubled relationships and a lifelong battle with painful endometriosis, miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies. Tara Hanks resists the temptation to make Monroe into a strong woman as we today would understand the term, and thereby gives us a far more believable and affecting heroine instead, showing us a different kind of strength and the grit behind the innocent smile.

Because we know what became of Marilyn Monroe, there is little sense in explaining the plot of a story we’ve all heard already. The wonderful thing about The Mmm Girl (the title taken from a nickname given to its heroine by the media of her day) is that, in telling us Monroe’s story from her own point of view, we get a whole new insight into just what the lady herself was up against. An industry in which posing for cheesecake and nude photos could give a hopeful the break she needed, only to be told her later in her career that she should deny having done so, or make excuses to ‘justify’ her actions. Being both adored and dismissed for her beauty and playfully sexual public persona, without anyone ever seeming to realise the talent and skill involved in creating and maintaining such a performance in the first place. Having to smile radiantly when in the grip of crippling depression. The husbands and lovers who were drawn to the idea of the vulnerable ingénue, then frustrated when her personal demons did not simply disappear, or she proved to have a mind and career of her own. But despite the inevitable tragic ending, this novel is not simply a downbeat tale of woe or paean to victimhood. Hanks humanises her subject – no mean feat when time and legend have transformed her into a goddess made of celluloid and rhinestones. A must-read for anyone interested in Marilyn Monroe, or the history of women in Hollywood.

This review on hagsharlotsheroines
tarahanks.org

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I wrote that review ages ago, but the hags site has been suffering from technical problems. It's back now, though, in a new, interactive format - and here's my profile there!