Is Marilyn Back? One Dr. Thinks so... in Someone Else's Body!

You're a young woman with a promising singing career in Canada and you're plagued by dreams of a life not your own. You're living in a world of the arts and you've never heard of the American movie star Marilyn Monroe, but a few people tell you that you remind them of her.

Lo and behold the next picture shows you asking some questions, seeing her in an old movie and realizing that you are her, you are Marilyn Monroe reincarnated.

This revelation doesn't help the headaches, the bad dreams, or the difficulties in relationships that you suffer through, so you set out to find someone to help you with this new problem, this Marilyn Monroe thing. Online you discover a man who works with regression therapy and after a stormy early correspondence you manage to bring yourself together with him and make another amazing discovery - your young daughter is Marilyn's psychotic mother reincarnated so that you can work out your problems with her after all this time.

That's the basic premise of this book about Dr. Adrian Finkelstein's journey backward and forward in time with Sherrie Lea Laird. His book is complete with "comparative" photographs of the two women, including hands, feet, teeth, hair, smiles and a picture of Gladys Baker, Norma Jean/Marilyn's mother side by side with Sherrie's daughter. There are testimonies from friends, relatives and acquaintances and lovers. There are transcripts of some of the regression sessions with the questions, prompts and responses. There's a lot to absorb.

Whether or not you believe in reincarnation, and I happen to, this book is sometimes hard to take. Finkelstein's methods seem questionable and his purpose - to allow the Marilyn side of Laird's world to accept her death and let Sherrie Lea be her own woman - is harder to handle.

Perhaps it is Finkelstein's often awkward way with the English language - he is European by birth - or his use of spurious science in the astrological sense that makes the book unbelievable. The case certainly seems to be strong enough otherwise. There's just something hard to take in this book and it will have to be a "case-by-case" decision as to whether or not this is fiction, reality, sham or a shame.

Both the doctor and the singer now have at least two websites apiece and they are no more illuminating than the content of the book. But the fact that she is exploiting her connection to a famous person of the past while pushing forward her own career is certainly one more suspect aspect of what we have before us.

Read this one at your risk.

Marilyn Monroe Returns; The Healing of a Soul by Adrian Finkelstein, M.D. Hampton Roads Publishing Co., Charlottesville, Virginia. 2006. 309 pages. $22.95.