About the Author
Lynn Cullen is the acclaimed author of more than 15 books for young readers. Now making her home in Atlanta, she also has written a well-reviewed new novel for adults, The Creation of Eve. In 2010, her book for young readers I am Rembrandt's Daughter was chosen for inclusion on the Georgia Center for the Book's list of "25 Books All Young Georgians Should Read."
Lynn Cullen was born in 1955 in Fort Wayne, Indiana and grew up there, receiving a BA in Education from Indiana University. She writes that, "I knew I wanted to be a writer from a very young age. I can still remember the first story I wrote, at age five, something about a bear that ate so much honey that he had to roll home in a barrel. I thought it was brilliant, although even then I had a niggling doubt about how that barrel came to be on top of a hill." She married and moved to Atlanta in her 20s and spent several years raising her family. As her children grew up, she volunteered at the school library and renewed her acuaintance with children's books. She took a writing class at Georgia State University studying under Dr. Thomas McHaney and soon after began publishing a variety of books for young readers.
Her first novel for adults, The Creation of Eve, appeared to considerable acclaim in 2010. "I found this novel about the quest for fulfillment in art and love enormously satisfying," wrote author Sara Guen, while another writer, Stephanie Cowell, called it a "marvelous, rich and compelling novel." The novel is based on a real-life figure who was a student of Michelangelo, Sofonisba Anguissola, the renowned but little known female artist of the Renaissance. The story's principal themes, she has written, are "that the spoken word can ruin a reputation, that just because history is written, that does not necessarily make it the truth, and that we can never truly understand the workings of another person's heart."
About the Book
They 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.
About the Event
The event will take place at the Roswell Library on May 11, 2026 at 2 p.m.
This event is part of the Friends of the Roswell Library's 2026 Annual Meeting. There is free and open to the public.
