Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters

Isabel Keating is a fine mimic of the Marilyn we know from the movies—it’s the same breathy, cotton-candy douceur, the voice lilting with wonderment, the same rounded consonants, the trill at the end of sentences. She sounds like a precocious child, very earnestly doing the introspective self-searching homework that the Strasberg method demanded. As seamless is Keating’s channeling of Monroe; it would have been a pleasure to glimpse the voice behind the baby voice, the woman behind the mask. The content is fragmentary, but there is delight in this picture of the icon as more sincere, striving, intellectually ambitious, and perceptive than we’d ever have guessed. A Farrar, Straus, and Giroux hardcover. (Oct.)