Marilyn's Last Sessions
Michel Schneider
Available as eBook
This prize-winning novel about Marilyn Monroe’s last days blends psychoanalysis and film noir in a riveting tragedy
‘It’s always the same,’ she told her analyst. ‘The man goes to sleep with Marilyn Monroe and wakes up with me.
In the years before her death, Marilyn Monroe visited a psychoanalyst several times a week. Her analyst, Dr Ralph Greenson, was the last person to see her alive and first to see her dead. From accounts of these final sessions, Michel Schneider conjures an enthralling novel about one of the most charismatic figures of the twentieth century, and the Hollywood world in which she lived and died.
“Intimate, inventive and heartbreaking”
Hanif Kureishi
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“Riveting … Tender, provocative, brimming with perception”
Lisa Appignanesi
“Schneider … writes Monroe so authentically that you often forget this is simply his imagined version of the last four years of her life … A joy’”
psychologies
“Schneider does Marilyn the justice of granting her a certain degree of dignity and an intuitive understanding of her own demons”
Sarah Churchwell
new Statesman
“Marvellous and insightful, a real vision of human delicacy, and one of the international novels of the year”
Andrew O’hagan
Michel Schneider
Michel Schneider has written on psychoanalysis, Baudelaire, Proust, Schumann and Glenn Gould. His essay collection, Morts Imaginaires (Grasset, 2003), won the Médicis Essay Award, and Marilyn’s Last Sessions was the winner of the Prix Interallie. He lives in France.
Will Hobson’s translations from French and German include the Goncourt Prize-winning The Battle by Patrick Rambaud, The Collector of Worlds by Iliya Troyanov and Being Arab by Samir Kassir, which won the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Award 2007. He is the author of The Redstone Inkblot Test and A Household Box: Knock Knock! Who’s There? We Are!.