WHEN WE WERE BRILLIANT by Lynn Cullen - Spotlight

 

They were an unlikely pair—a blond bombshell and a photographer determined to be taken seriously. Still, Marilyn Monroe and Eve Arnold would make a deal that would change their lives in this dazzling new novel, When We Were Brilliant (Berkley).

In 1952, Norma Jeane Baker follows documentary photographer Eve Arnold into a powder room on the night they first meet. She has a proposition for her. Norma Jeane created Marilyn Monroe to be photographed, and she wants Eve to do it. Eve is better than anyone she’s seen at revealing a person’s inner truth. Together they can help each other. Together, she says, they can make something brilliant.

Skeptical of this cipher of a young woman, Eve demurs. She’s looking for more serious subjects than this ambitious starlet. But she keeps getting drawn back into Marilyn’s orbit, and the women come to recognize something in each other—something fundamental. Nothing will get in the way of what they want, and when Marilyn’s star takes off to teetering heights, neither will ever be the same.

A lavish and transporting novel, When We Were Brilliant captures the halcyon days of an icon and the grit of women determining their own futures as it explores the exceptional and complicated friendship between Marilyn Monroe and Eve Arnold.

Lynn Cullen is the bestselling author of historical novels The Sisters of Summit Avenue, Twain’s End, Mrs. Poe, Reign of Madness, and I Am Rembrandt’s Daughter. To read about Lynn’s introduction to writing historical fiction, click here.

Her novel, Mrs. Poe, was named a Book of the Week by People Magazine, a Target Book Club Pick, an NPR 2013 Great Read, an Indie Next List selection. It was also a  book of the month at Costco, an Oprah Book of the Week, and Atlanta magazine named it one of the Best Books of 2013.

Twain’s End was a People Magazine Book of the Week, a Townsend Prize finalist, an Indie Next selection, and named a Book All Georgians Should Read by the Georgia Center for the Book. Lynn’s novels have been translated into seventeen languages and she has appeared on PBS’s American Masters.

Lynn grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the fifth girl in a family of seven children. She learned to love history combined with traveling while visiting historic sites across the U.S. on annual family camping trips. She attended Indiana University in Bloomington and Fort Wayne, and took writing classes with Tom McHaney at Georgia State. 

She wrote children’s books as her three daughters were growing up, while working in a pediatric office, and later, on the editorial staff of a psychoanalytic journal at Emory University. While her camping expeditions across the States have become fact-finding missions across Europe, she still loves digging into the past. However, she does not miss sleeping in musty sleeping bags. Or eating canned fruit cocktail.

She now lives in Atlanta with her husband, their dog, and two unscrupulous cats.