Barbara Leaming, her book "Marilyn Monroe," page 23, regarding Arthur Miller;
"As he once said, he could not write about anything he understood completely. If an experience was finished he couldn't write it.
I believe from reading this book, which focuses on Marilyn Monroe's role in the business of her career, that Leaming intends to explain Miller and his writery nature as involved in mining his own confusion, in particular in life situations that are emotional. At what point, as he wrote "The Misfits," did he feel he knew as much about Marilyn as he cared to in one lifetime? Was she right to feel terrible betrayal at being used as an inspiration for a character, one not well regarded, for this work? An obect of fascination then and it seems eternally, Marilyn Monroe often encountered men who were in love with the character Marilyn; she portrayed her as the "happy girl" that men love. She was deeper and darker than that, and being able to relax into revealing the self with a man - a husband - was an experience she longed for and never really quite had.
Still, using real people as inspirations for characters or as characters - or using one or more for the same reason - is a literary tradition. Perhaps more than ever, friends and family are attracted like the moth to the flame to seeing themselves in someone's published book. I on the other hand have invented characters who real people claimed to be, when I wasn't even particularily thinking of them. I get the feeling that few moments of fame that Andy Warhol predicted to be the future is now!
How much do we write that is truly "autobiographical" in nature?
