The Joy of Writing by Hand – Gawker

Last year, while scrolling through the quiet, comforting halls of Tumblr, the last bastion of sanity on the internet, I came across an image of an unpublished poem handwritten by Marilyn Monroe. When she died, Monroe’s belongings were left to Lee Strasberg, her acting teacher, who later passed them to his wife, Anna, who later discovered various writings, including the poem, that became a book called Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters. The poem begins, “Only parts of us will ever/ touch only parts of others.” Like the other weepy denizens of Tumblr, I was primed to respond to the image with slightly condescending intrigue; but what struck me most was not just the content of Monroe’s poem but her handwriting itself. Written on lined paper, in pencil, her script looked like the samples of proper cursive I was made to copy in Catholic school — uniform double L’s, large, looping O’s. Other entries, like a page from her 1955-1956 diary, show diametrically opposed characters, chaotically scrawled in print. “I’m finding that sincerity and trying to be as simple or direct as (possible) I’d like is often taken for sheer stupidity.”In the New Yorker, Jenny Hendrix wrote of the collection, “One…
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