Michel Schneider's top 10 books about Marilyn Monroe

Michel Schneider is the author of three novels, including Marilyn's Last Sessions, which was the winner of the Prix Interallié (2006) and has now been translated into English by Will Hobson, published this month by Canongate. He has also written many essays on psychoanalysis, music, literature and the psychopathology of politics.

Buy Marilyn's Last Sessions by Michel Schneider at the Guardian bookshop

"Hundreds of books have been written about Marilyn. My personal reasons for writing a novel about her were probably quite different from those which had previously inspired so many biographers and authors. My interest was: why was she so intensely caught between public and private, words and images, trying to escape from the icon she became and cure herself with her own words? I was deeply moved to find her so desperate to match Polonius's advice 'To thine own self be true', and her solitary death made me rephrase this idea of the great psychoanalyst DW Winnicott: 'Sometimes, to save your true self, you have to kill your self as a whole.' The good Marilyn books – ordered here alphabetically – are those in which she appears as a person; the bad ones, those that treat her as a sex idol trapped in the mess of Hollywood."

1. Marilyn Monroe by Eve Arnold

Arnold was the only woman to have photographed Marilyn extensively, and the two became friends after a photo shoot for Esquire magazine in 1952. At the end of Marilyn's life, Arnold spent two months photographing her while she was shooting The Misfits. Her photos are far from serving the myth of the too obvious sex symbol; accompanied by a moving text, they give a tender portrait of the fading star.

2. Music for Chameleons by Truman Capote

Truman Capote wrote several portraits of Marilyn, his close friend – a tender and cruel series of depictions of the blonde with whom he had drunk "white angels" in Manhattan bars. He quoted the following pun by the smart though unintellectual Marilyn: "When that day will come, I would like to be delayed attending my own funeral."

3. Marilyn, Mon Amour by Andre de Dienes

In 1945, fashion photographer Andre de Dienes met an aspiring young brunette model named Norma Jeane. He instantly fell in love and transformed her into Marilyn Monroe over the course of a series of road trips which they took together. He wrote secret memoirs, which were discovered when Monroe fans ransacked his house after his death in 1988. From their trip to see her mother in a mental hospital to Marilyn's visit to his home a few days before her death, De Dienes recounts all of the emotional moments they shared. A beautiful story of friendship and love.

4. Hollywood on the Couch by Stephen Farber and Mark Green

A kind of bible. The first, and probably only, book ever written on the strange love affair between psychoanalysts and moviemakers in the 50s and 60s. The book offers a portrait of Ralph Greenson, whom I transformed in my novel into a kind of dark prince of the analyst's couch, ruling all aspects of Marilyn's life.

5. On Loving, Hating and Living Well by Ralph Greenson

Greenson was a great Freudian clinician and he left a series of remarkable theoretical essays in psychotherapy. Some of them were secretly inspired by the case of his most celebrated patient.

6. The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe by Andrew O'Hagan

Maf is a dog Frank Sinatra gave to Marilyn. With his new owner, the lucky pup has a period of perfect companionship in New York city, attending shows, sitting in on analyst appointments, witnessing Sinatra tantrums, and attending bookish soirees. Maf's bitter ruminations accompany Marilyn's decline.

7. Marilyn Monroe by Barbara Leaming

Until she died, Monroe wasn't just a "candle in the wind" – an abused, confused girl from an orphanage with a mother in a madhouse. She was also an ambitious actress, who knew how to craft a persona and play power games. Leaming fully describes her tragic fate, rising from sexual party favour for showbiz men to the movie superstar who pushes them around, until she crashes, a victim of self-loathing and drug addiction. She even apparently solves Monroe's suicide with clues from the letters written by Greenson to Anna Freud. Her last overdose may have happened just because on an August Saturday night her shrink went to dinner with his wife and she felt abandoned.

8. My Story by Marilyn Monroe

Icons rarely speak, and never write. Usually. Written at the height of her fame but not published until more than a decade after her death, this autobiography poignantly recounts her childhood as an unwanted orphan, her early adolescence, her rise in the film industry from bit player to celebrity, and her marriage to Joe DiMaggio. In this intimate account of a very public life, Marilyn reveals herself as a gifted, vulnerable, sensible writer. In vivid scenes, she tells of her first (non-consensual) sexual experience, her repeated romantic failures, and her prescient vision of herself as "the kind of girl they found dead in the hall bedroom with an empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand".

9. Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates

Guess who Blonde is? She has no name in this compelling 700-plus-page novel based on Monroe's life. Only great writers have the talent to let us imagine we understand Marilyn's enigma. Murder, plot, suicide, hallucination, reality? Maybe all of these at once: great novelists being those that leave you with more questions than answers.

10. Marilyn Monroe: The Biography by Donald Spoto

Using more than 150 interviews and some 35,000 pages of previously sealed files, including Monroe's diaries, letters, and other personal and revealing documents, this is certainly the best and most accurate biography of Marilyn. Spoto reveals new details of every aspect of her life, and her mysterious death. No, Marilyn was not killed by the Kennedys. Her suicide may have been accidental, after being fed all those barbiturates by different people over the years; and Greenson and her housekeeper, Eunice Murray, may have had a hand in it.