Gals I'm glad I can't channel

As I wrestle with issues of self esteem and personal direction, I would love to go to a Ouija board and get help from a pair of former First Ladies (see below). There are other famous women who have dealt with similar issues on a much grander scale, and their life stories have touched me enormously. But even if we could somehow meet for a cosmic tea party or perhaps sit down for girl talk and cosmos in some celestial bar, I don't think I would take their advice.

Diana, Princess of Wales. Beautiful and beloved, her death was a shock and it left a void that people still feel today. She was revered for her selfless charity work. She was admired for her fashion sense and charisma. She also dealt with bulimia/anorexia, post-partum depression, insecurity about her intellect and a dramatic, self-destructive streak a mile wide. For example, back in the early 1990s she was rumored to be enamored of a married man in her social circle named Oliver Hoare. (Whether or not they were actually lovers has never been established, has it?) She became so overcome by her love/infatuation with him that she made a series of anonymous phone calls to his home. It became such a nuisance that his wife called the police, and the trail led back to the (then) future Queen of England. (I haven't done anything that desperate and dopey … yet. Though I understand her impulse.) These scandalous revelations don't diminish her in my eyes, they enhance her humanity. But I don't think she's a good role model for me just now.

Marilyn Monroe. Oh, the hold she still has on us! My neice is just 13, yet knows Marilyn on sight and asked me recently if I thought she killed herself. Who among today's actresses could still command our interest almost 45 years after her death? She was luminous on screen, yet was so wracked with insecurity that some days she just couldn't leave her dressing room and show up on the set. An international, intergenerational sex symbol, she needed pills to sleep … alone. Always recreating herself, she seemed tormented by the circumstances of her early life. (I know it's a cliche but it still works: Marilyn Monroe just couldn't shake Norma Jean Baker.) To me, she's a perfect feminist cautionary tale: this is what happens you try to make yourself into who "they" want you to be. She seemed to have relinquished all of her personal power to the people around her. That's why, in answer to my neice's question, oddly enough I hope she did kill herself (or at least died as a result of an accidental overdose). Suicide is referred to as death "by one's own hand." When people say Marilyn was murdered, they even take that final, most personal decision away from her.

Mary Todd Lincoln. OK, she wasn't a babe. But she did win the heart of one of the greatest men of all time, so she had to have something going for her. Yet she was ultimately a tragic figure. She was smart, well educated and savvy enough in the ways of politics that she was able to help her husband realize his ambitions. (And what lofty ambitions they were for a poor country lawyer!) She was intellectually curious for a woman of her time, spending time with soldiers, newly freed slaves and even spiritualists in her attempt to learn more about the world around her. Her life story is one of staggering loss, though. Her mother died when she was very young, she had a tumultuous relationship with her stepmother, and she was at her husband's side when he was murdered. Even worse, of her four sons, only one grew to maturity, and he had her institutionalized. I don't know if her depression was caused by all this grief or if she had always been wound a bit too tight and this cavalcade of loss just pushed her over. It doesn't matter. Poor Mary wasn't strong enough to take what life gave her. I am especially haunted by an assessment of Mary, because I believe it's true of me, too. "She did the wrong things well."