Six books that explore the machinery behind celebrity culture

Candice Wuehle is author of Monarch, Fidelitoria: Fixed or Fluxed, Death Industrial Complex, and BOUND. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

Her new novel is Ultranatural.

At Lit Hub Wuehle tagged six titles that explore the machinery behind celebrity culture. "Taken together, they suggest that celebrity has always been less about visibility and more about narrative control." One title on the list:

Joyce Carol Oates, Blonde

Joyce Carol Oates’s monumental reimagining of Marilyn Monroe’s life remains one of the grittiest and most disturbing novels ever written about celebrity. I’ve read Blonde three times: once when it came out, again in my twenties, and then years later while I was working out the structure of Ultranatural. Each time hit different, although this last time the machinery of celebrity production Oates highlights stood out. Rather than reproducing Monroe’s public mythology, Oates invents a fictional interior life for Norma Jeane Baker, exploring the psychological cost of becoming a cultural icon. One scene has stayed with me across all three readings: the moment when nude photos are taken for what will later become Monroe’s infamous Playboy spread.

In Oates’s telling, Norma Jeane isn’t thinking about scandal or fame. She is preoccupied with something much smaller—she hopes the bottoms of her feet won’t show in the photographs. That tiny anxiety becomes a devastating microcosm of celebrity itself: the star worries about one vulnerable detail while the image is destined to circulate far beyond her control. When the photographs resurface later and ignite a scandal, the studio forces Monroe into a carefully staged public apology. Reading it now, the scene feels eerily familiar—a rehearsal for the ritual that would play out decades later when Britney Spears was likewise pushed to apologize to the paparazzi and the public for the spectacle built around her own image. In Oates’s hands, the novel exposes the brutal asymmetry at the heart of celebrity culture: the world consumes the image, while the person behind it struggles to survive the narrative imposed upon them.

Read about another entry on Wuehle's list.

Blonde also appears among Jerome Charyn's five best books about the lives of divas, Nathan Smith's seven top Marilyn Monroe books, Rose Tremain's six best books, John O’Farrell's top ten celebrity appearances in fiction, Michel Schneider's top ten books on Marilyn Monroe, Ron Hansen's five best literary tales of real-life crimes, and Janet Fitch's book list.

--Marshal Zeringue