Suicide crises

Suicide crises in the novel are not a single turning point but a recurring pressure in the lives of Gladys Mortensen and her daughter, Norma Jeane Baker, later known as Marilyn Monroe. Gladys’s long psychiatric institutionalization is shaped by earlier self-harm and psychosis, while Norma Jeane’s crises surface amid medication dependence, emotional isolation, and the strain of being required to keep working. The narrative repeatedly withholds certainty about intention: medical records, family members, and the patient herself do not always offer the same account. That uncertainty makes survival feel precarious rather than conclusive.

Gladys Mortensen: illness, self-harm, and institutional care

Gladys’s crisis is first presented through the voices she has spent years trying to ignore. At work in a photographic negatives laboratory, chemical fumes make her eyes water as she is escorted to a telephone. The voices in her head seem to urge her on, but she recognizes them as unreal and tries to filter them out. Since the birth of her last daughter, she has become practiced at managing these intrusions, though exhaustion can make them break through. Her fear that the call concerns Norma Jeane gives way to news of her own mother, Della Monroe. In this scene, Gladys’s psychiatric distress appears not as a detached diagnosis but as a constant effort to distinguish inner voices from external events while continuing to work.

By the time Norma Jeane seeks permission to visit her, Gladys has been hospitalized for ten years at Norwalk State Hospital. A psychiatrist describes her as near the highest level of recovery possible in her case. Several courses of electroshock treatment have reduced her episodes, and medication is being used to prevent depressive and manic attacks. Hospital records say that for years she has not tried to harm herself or anyone else. The account establishes both the clinical basis for supervised care and its limits: a record of reduced self-harm does not restore the relationship between mother and daughter or remove the fear surrounding Gladys’s illness.

Norma Jeane has not seen Gladys in a decade, yet recognizes her immediately. She approaches the thin woman in a faded green gown, calls her mother, and begins to cry. Gladys neither returns the embrace nor pulls away. Norma Jeane later remembers them both crying, though in the scene it is Norma Jeane who cries. The encounter becomes important to her acting: after failing to summon tears in early lessons, she finds that she can cry after the visit. The crisis therefore enters her life both as family history and as an experience that alters her ability to perform emotion.

Norma Jeane’s stated wish to die and the question of intention

As Norma Jeane’s career develops, her own suicidal danger becomes harder to separate from the treatment intended to keep her safe. In England, her husband searches through her luggage for the pills she has secretly brought with her. He is ashamed to be looking, but he believes he must help. She struggles and kicks at him, furious and in tears, and tells him to let her die. The scene makes the conflict immediate: the person trying to prevent harm experiences intervention as another refusal to leave her in peace, while the hidden supply of medication shows that danger has traveled with her.

A later account reveals the gravity of what happened during the English episode. Norma Jeane had undergone gastric lavage, and the amount of chemicals in her blood had been lethal. A doctor asked her husband whether she had tried to kill herself, but he did not tell her what the doctor suspected. He feared that naming the event would interrupt the recovery and happiness he thought she had begun to regain. Norma Jeane herself appears not to know how close to death she had been. The gap between her husband’s knowledge and hers makes the episode a crisis not only of survival but of testimony: the facts are known within the marriage but withheld from the person most affected.

Later, when a doctor questions her about how many barbiturates she had taken and whether she had deliberately endangered her life, she shakes her head without speaking. Her denial does not settle what happened. It sits alongside the earlier lethal blood levels, her husband’s unspoken fear, and her own plea to be allowed to die. The novel preserves the contradiction rather than resolving it into a definitive account of motive.

Recurrent danger, surveillance, and medication

The risk resurfaces in the account of a period when Norma Jeane is kept under observation because, during delirium, she has repeatedly expressed a wish to take her own life. She is registered under a false name, and her room is full of flowers. The contrast between that cheerful room and the concealed identity sharpens the difference between the public star and the patient being watched for signs of danger. Observation offers protection, but it also places her life under institutional scrutiny and makes her distress something recorded and managed by others.

At work, the danger takes another form. After an interruption disrupts a scene, Norma Jeane forgets her lines and plays the wrong notes on her ukulele. She begins striking her thighs, shouting, and tearing at her carefully styled hair. The director stops her from clawing her face, and Doc Fell arrives with a nurse to take her away in tears. The narrator leaves the injection she receives in the privacy of her dressing room unexplained. This restraint matters: the episode shows an acute breakdown and immediate medical intervention, but it does not establish that the injection was an attempted suicide or disclose exactly what was administered.

Her use of Nembutal to obtain sleep further blurs the distinction between relief and danger. In a locked dressing room, with a do-not-disturb sign on the door and Whitey standing guard, she sleeps for stretches ranging from two or three hours to fifteen. She vomits the liquid medication, and the account describes its effects as gradually carrying her into dreamless sleep while panic ebbs. When she wakes confused, she may imagine herself in a room from the lost domestic life she shared with Baby, or in an unfamiliar place amid the wreckage of a room she has damaged while dissociated. The medication brings temporary respite, but its potency, her disorientation, and the scenes of destruction make that refuge unstable.

Narrative significance

The crises of Gladys and Norma Jeane are linked without being treated as identical. Gladys’s voices, diagnosis, hospital records, and history of self-harm belong to a long institutional course; Norma Jeane’s danger appears in episodes of overdose, delirium, medication use, and explicit despair. The novel shows how psychiatric labels and records can describe risk while failing to capture the uncertainty experienced by patients and relatives. In Gladys’s case, years without recorded self-harm coexist with a relationship still marked by distance. In Norma Jeane’s, a potentially lethal episode can remain unacknowledged even within the marriage.

The pattern also complicates the idea of recovery. Medication, supervision, guarded sleep, and the intervention of relatives or medical staff may interrupt immediate danger, but the narrative does not present them as a final cure. A room filled with flowers, a protected dressing-room door, and a husband’s search through luggage are different forms of care, each shadowed by concealment and fear. Across these scenes, survival is real but provisional: it depends on people recognizing danger, while the reasons and intentions behind that danger remain only partly knowable.