What is the title of your latest release?
WHEN WE WERE BRILLIANT
What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book?
In a bid to be taken seriously, Marilyn Monroe and photographer Eve Arnold make a deal that will change their lives.
How did you decide where your book was going to take place?
I write my novels around actual events in the lives of famous people, so in this case, where the lives of Marilyn Monroe and Eve Arnold intersected determined where the book was set. That place, mostly, was New York, with side trips to Marilyn’s movie locations and Eve’s photo shoots as a documentary photographer.
Would you hang out with your heroine in real life?
Oh, most definitely. I grew close to both Marilyn Monroe and Eve Arnold over the two and a half years that I wrote about them. My job was to understand why they did what they did, so it was important to understand the roots of their shortcomings. I might love them even more after knowing their flaws and what they had to overcome.
What are three words that describe your hero?
Marilyn Monroe: Tenacious, Brilliant, Transcendent
Eve Arnold: Tenacious, Brilliant, Transcendent
Although my two heroes look and sound radically different, in essential ways they are very much alike.
What’s something you learned while writing this book?
I learned that Eve Arnold broke her silence on Marilyn Monroe upon hearing Elton John’s Candle in the Wind.
Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done?
Both! That’s why it takes me a few years to write a novel. The amount of research necessary for a biographical novel slows down the writing as well.
What’s your favorite foodie indulgence?
Good old homemade chocolate chip cookies
Describe your writing space/office!
I’m in it right now: I’m on the couch with a cat sleeping on my lap.
Who is an author you admire?
Goodness, I am in awe of hundreds of authors! But since you asked for one, Ann Patchett.
Is there a book that changed your life?
Of the dozens of books that have changed my life, I’ll start with the first one, and that’s The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf and illustrated by Robert Lawson.
Tell us about when you got “the call.” (when you found out your book was going to be published). Or, for indie authors, when you decided to self-publish.
I was at the Georgia Sea Turtle Rescue Center on Jekyll Island with my grandkids. When my agent called, I missed out on the feeding of the turtles and could hardly focus on getting the kids souvenirs at the giftshop afterward.
What’s your favorite genre to read?
Once an English lit major, always an English lit major, so literary novels tend to get my attention first.
What’s your favorite movie?
This is a hard question! But I will say that if I walk into a room where Forest Gump is playing, I can’t resist sitting down and watching the rest.
What is your favorite season?
Spring!
How do you like to celebrate your birthday?
I go with my three grown daughters to New York, Chicago, or such like for a few days, and then go on a trip somewhere with all the grandkids I can muster. I use my birthday as an excuse to draw together my sprawling family. I’m grateful that they humor me.
What’s a recent tv show/movie/book/podcast you highly recommend?
The Pitt
What’s your favorite type of cuisine?
Mexican is my comfort food.
What do you do when you have free time?
I try to get in a four or five mile walk every day. And I try to see family and friends. Both are best combined on a trip to New York or Europe or somewhere mountainous, where I’m always on the lookout for stories about extraordinary people.
What can readers expect from you next?
Look for another novel about an unseen woman who changed the world. Bringing these women to light is my life’s work.
WHEN WE WERE BRILLIANT by Lynn Cullen
Narrator: Rachel L. Jacobs
hey were an unlikely pair—a blond bombshell and a photographer determined to be taken seriously—but Marilyn Monroe and Eve Arnold would make a deal that would change their lives in this dazzling new novel from the national bestselling author of Mrs. Poe and The Woman with the Cure.
In 1952, Norma Jeane Baker follows documentary photographer Eve Arnold into a powder room on the night they first meet. She has a proposition for her. Norma Jeane created Marilyn Monroe to be photographed, and she wants Eve to do it. Eve is better than anyone she’s seen at revealing a person’s inner truth. Together they can help each other. Together, she says, they can make something brilliant.
Skeptical of this cipher of a young woman, Eve demurs. She’s looking for more serious subjects than this ambitious starlet. But she keeps getting drawn back into Marilyn’s orbit, and the women come to recognize something in each other—something fundamental. Nothing will get in the way of what they want, and when Marilyn’s star takes off to teetering heights, neither will ever be the same.
A lavish and transporting novel, When We Were Brilliant captures the halcyon days of an icon and the grit of women determining their own futures as it explores the exceptional and complicated friendship between Marilyn Monroe and Eve Arnold.
Literature and Fiction Literary | Non-Fiction Biography [ Berkley, On Sale: January 20, 2026, Hardcover / e-Book / audiobook, ISBN: 9780593815854 / eISBN: 9780593815861 ]
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About Lynn Cullen
Lynn Cullen grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the fifth girl in a family of seven children. She learned to love history combined with traveling while visiting historic sites across the U.S. on annual family camping trips. She attended Indiana University in Bloomington and Fort Wayne, and took writing classes with Tom McHaney at Georgia State. She wrote children’s books as her three daughters were growing up, while working in a pediatric office and later, at Emory University on the editorial staff of a psychoanalytic journal. While her camping expeditions across the States have become fact-finding missions across Europe, she still loves digging into the past. She does not miss, however, sleeping in musty sleeping bags. Or eating canned fruit cocktail. Lynn Cullen’s recent novel, Mrs. Poe, a national bestseller, has been named a Target Book Club Pick, an NPR 2013 Great Read, an Oprah.com “Book that Makes Time Stand Still,” a People pick, and an Indie Next List selection. Her current release, Twain’s End, called “reputation squaring…incendiary” by the New York Times and “intelligently drawn” by Library Journal, is an Indie Next selection, People Book of the Week, and 2016 Townsend Prize finalist. Cullen, named “the Bronte of our day” by the Huffington Post, now lives in Atlanta surrounded by her large family, and, like Mark Twain, enjoys being bossed around by cats.
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