Caitlin flanagan biography of barack

  • Born and raised in Berkeley, California, Flanagan earned a B.A. and an M.A. in art history from the University of Virginia.
  • Caitlin Flanagan is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
  • Seamus Heaney wrote Caitlin Flanagan a poem, on the occasion of her baptism as a child.

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    Inventing Marilyn

    Culture

    Anyone who thinks the story of Marilyn Monroe doesn't warrant such attention doesn't know much about it.

    By Caitlin Flanagan

    Thump—it landed on the doorstep last summer like an abandoned baby: the newest biography of Marilyn Monroe, a bouncing 515 pages and obviously loved. Tucked between its covers were 51 pages of footnotes, an 88-person list of interviewees, a four-page guide to abbreviations and “manuscript collections consulted.” Had it found a forever family? Sadly, no; it had been left at yet another hateful group home. After some mild bureaucratic processing—its publicity materials and padded mailer confiscated and tossed in the recycling bin, its well of familiar photographs perfunctorily ticked through—it ended up on a shelf crammed with other Marilyn bios, some tall and lovely and filled with pictures, others squat and densely written, a few handsomely published and seemingly important. It would have to find its place

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    Caitlin Flanagan

    Caitlin Flanagan is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She is the author of Girl Land and To Hell With All That. Caitlin Flanagan began her magazine-writing career, in 2001, with a series of extended book reviews about the conflicts at the very heart of modern life—specifically, modern domestic life as it is lived by professional-class women. Flanagan quickly established herself as a highly entertaining social critic unafraid to take on self-indulgence and political correctness, and her essays provide penetrating and witheringly funny observations about the sexes and their discontents.

    Flanagan's Atlantic articles have been named as finalists for the National Magazine Award seven times, and her essay “Confessions of a Prep School College Counselor,” which ran in September 2001, was included in the 2002 compilation of Best American Magazine Writing. Her work has also been included in Best American Essays 2003 and Best American Magazine Writing 2003. She

  • caitlin flanagan biography of barack

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    Here are a few of the Joans I know. The girl who arrives at Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York feeling uneasy about her dress. The woman who rubs an ice cube against her lower back in a hotel room with a broken air-conditioning unit. The journalist who turns down acid offered to her by an interviewee. When I think of Joan Didion, I think of a packing list for a reporting trip that included bourbon and two skirts. And then the story of her husband reading her own book to her, cover to cover, as a birthday gift.

     

    Of course, I don’t know Joan Didion at all. She renders these images from her life so vividly, but then with sleight of hand she manages to obscure herself. What is Joan Didion like at a party? Does she move her hands as she speaks? Is she reserved? Funny? How did she act as a wife, as a mom?

     

    There’s a tendency to adopt a lofty tone when addressing Didion’s career. Presenting her with the National Humanities Medal in 2012, Barack Obama called her ‘one of