What struck me about the cards wasn’t their flagrant objectification of women; sadly, that’s not very striking. Rather, it was their cuteness.

There are more photographs of Marilyn Monroe reading than there are of her naked. Almost always, these images are captioned with a kind of perky can-you-believe-it paternalism. “Those books aren’t just for show!” “Despite her reputation as a blonde…”

Collage is a process of ingestion, in which media creates and presents and recycles images and we respond to these intoxicating images by hoarding and repurposing them. Magazines are called “digests” after all.

What I mean is that the narrative of the life of Nina Simone, up until 1976, had created a perfect moment in time and space for her to vanish. Walk off the stage while she sat at the piano. Dissociate.