Elizabeth Bachner’s column in the March issue of Bookslut discusses Jeffrey Meyers’s new book The Genius and the Goddess: Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe.

“I went through a phase where I read all the literature I could find about Marilyn Monroe. A lot of it is bitter, people who are equal parts fascinated and angry and jealous, wanting to tear her down, and then talking about her vulnerability, about her secret innocence, about the way she was a tragedy — but their sympathy seems tinny. It’s been a while since I thought much about Marilyn, but now I’m reading Jeffrey Meyers’s The Genius and the Goddess: Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, about the marriage between two all-American icons. Meyers finds Arthur Miller very dignified. . . . The women in The Genius and the Goddess — Marilyn, Paula Strasberg, Mary Slattery Miller (the wife that got dumped for Marilyn), Natasha Lytess and others — all come off as unhinged crazies, but the book is an interesting account of a pivotal moment in American history, and especially in the history of the intersection between art and icon-making.”