AceShowbiz - Marilyn Monroe's pleas to end her life in the years leading up to her tragic death have been exposed in a new book featuring excerpts from personal diaries, notes and letters. The movie icon detailed her feelings of torment in a number of writings, left to her New York acting mentor Lee Strasberg, in which she complains about the loneliness of working in Hollywood and explains her anguish about her troubled love life.

In an entry following the breakdown of her marriage to baseball star Joe DiMaggio, she asks herself why she "always felt in a certain way that I am subhuman, why in other words, I am the worst. Even physically, I have always been sure that something was not right with me."

But her muddled state of mind is shown in a note penned after the collapse of her second marriage, to playwright Aurthur Miller in 1958. She wrote, "Help, help, help. I feel life approaching when all that I want is to die."

Monroe died from a drug overdose in 1962. "Fragments" is set to hit book retailers later this month.