Boy Who Took Marilyn to the Prom

"... mesmerizing... a haunting trauma... grippingly strange, poignantly melancholic and psychologically sophisticated... a sensitive exploration of the effects of unreconciled sadness." Kirkus Reviews. Hardly any relationship is more fraught with unspoken feelings and words than one between a male psychiatrist and a sad female patient. It is even more so when the patient takes the therapist back to tormenting memories of a woman from his youth. In 1961, a year before her death, Marilyn Monroe's last psychiatrist invited her into his family in a desperate attempt to save the actress by giving her a family she never had. One evening over dinner the doctor suggests that his son take the actress to his senior prom at Hollywood High School, an experience Marilyn missed because she never finished school. She was 35-looking no older than a college coed-and the boy was 17. That night haunts him until 2007 when that youth, now a psychiatrist himself, takes on a patient who reminds him of Marilyn.