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"Dark Sparkler" by Amber Tamblyn.

Amber Tamblyn has had a long and successful acting career, starting back when she was 11. She's gone on to roles on the small screen in "Joan of Arcadia" and "Two and a Half Men" and on the big screen in "Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" and "127 Hours."

The now-32-year-old has been writing poetry as long as she's been acting, and she recently published a new collection, "Dark Sparkler," which she'll read from Saturday at Bank Square Books in Mystic.

The poems explore the lives and deaths of actresses who died young, from Jayne Mansfield to Sharon Tate to Dana Plato.

The seeds for "Dark Sparkler" started when Tamblyn wrote a poem about Brittany Murphy, who died in 2009 at age 32. Tamblyn was about the same age as Murphy and although they never met, they'd see each other at auditions. Tamblyn felt compelled to write about Murphy. Among the evocative stanzas: "Her body dies like a spider's / In the shower / the blooming flower / seeds a cemetery" and "The Country says good things / about the body / They print the best photos / the least bones / the most peach."

That one poem led to developing the "Dark Sparkler" theme, thanks to some outside advice.

"I had some very encouraging writer friends who were really the ones that said, 'This is right up your alley, and you should definitely do a book on the subject,'" Tamblyn says.

It evolved a great deal over the course of five years.

"When it started, I don't think I was like (affects a dramatic voice) 'And now I begin the journey that is the dead actress story.' It started very simply. It started with me Googling, searching, looking up women who had died," she says.

For the most part, she wrote about actresses who died before the age of 40. The more research she did, the more she learned stories about their lives and about commonalities between them. With the poems, she is trying to show their humanity and to encourage readers to feel empathy for the situations they were in.

Tamblyn wants to reflect, too, that these women craved the same things that everyone craves — intimacy. They wanted a real bond, not just the one-way mirror of fame where they would affect but weren't affected, Tamblyn says.

She hopes people also will "consider their own relationships with stardom — their own relationship to glamorizing, you know, the Kardashians or Lindsay Lohan, anybody like that. Just consider your own relationship to the sparkle of it all."

Speaking of Lohan, Tamblyn has included a piece about her in "Dark Sparkler." It consists of Lohan's name with a blank page. Tamblyn says, "It's a book about objectification, but it's also a book about voyeurism. It's about how people project everything they want onto celebrity culture and onto the people that they idolize. ...The blank page is for the reader. The blank page is meant to make the reader think about, I hope, what they feel when they see that blank page. Does that page make them think I'm (a jerk)? Do they think I'm mean? Do they think I'm catty? Do they think it's very sad? Does it make their heart sink? Do they think it's funny? All those things. It's an examination of the audience."

Tamblyn created poems about actresses people might not know — Judith Barsi and Peg Entwistle and a few fictional ones — along with those everyone certainly does know, like Marilyn Monroe: "A fourth fret crept into the neck / of her index finger / She had wound strands of blond too tightly / A corpse corset of a capo / It stayed like that: a rosy ring of jailed blood / that came to the barred window / and never left."

Her poem about Frances Farmer was inspired in large part by Farmer's episode of "This Is Your Life." Farmer was eerily calm and looked, for a lack of a better term, not in her body, Tamblyn says. She adds that, despite the folklore about Farmer's having been lobotomized, she actually wasn't. Farmer's hauntingly detached manner on "This Is Your Life" got Tamblyn imagining a poem about a woman who is the walking dead — but whom people treat as if she's still alive, even though she's clearly dead on the inside.

"Life has been stolen from her, taken from her, which then started turning into its own metaphor about the way that I view red carpets and how skinny women are on red carpets and things like that," she says. "There's a whole section of the poem — Frances Farmer walking a red carpet, she's emaciated and she's dragging a broken ankle behind her and there are worms crawling out of her mouth. Everyone's still screaming at her, 'Oh, you look amazing! What are you wearing?' (It's) just this idea of somebody that no one knows is dead or dying when they're standing right in front of you."

In "Dark Sparkler's" epilogue, Tamblyn turns her focus on herself, in poems and emails. One of the latter, dated Jan. 2009, says she knows it's going to a bad year for her; "I think I could very possibly be heading toward a full-scale breakdown in the next few months. ... Can I just go the way of Brittany Murphy and say (forget) it, do drugs until I drop and call it a day?" she writes.

That wasn't a period of depression, Tamblyn says, but rather was about "this terror that I knew I was not living my life to a fuller potential and having no clue whatsoever as to how to make that happen. ... (I was thinking), 'Is this really what you want to do you for the rest of your life? Audition and get a role, and audition and get a role' ... Your life constantly being in the hands of other people. It's hard."

At that point, she had written the Murphy poem as well as one about "Diff'rent Strokes" actress Dana Plato.

"I started to feel like gravitating toward people who were dead, which I think was ultimately a little scary and questionable. One of the many great things about my husband is he never questioned that," she says of spouse, David Cross. "... He was supportive and loving and would make me laugh. I think he just knew I was doing the work, and part of the work is expressing the fear of the work."

(By the way, Cross, the comedian-actor-writer, will be doing his stand-up Saturday night at Foxwoods' Grand Theater, after Tamblyn does her afternoon author reading at Bank Square Books.)

As for acting, Tamblyn recently filmed several episodes of "Inside Amy Schumer"; "I'm really excited about it. I've done all of her seasons, and she's a dear friend," she says.

She's also done a film for Netflix with Bob Odenkirk called "Girlfriend's Day" that should be out later this year.

Asked about a new "Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants," she says, "Nothing's confirmed, but it's definitely in the works."

And Tamblyn says about her debut directorial effort "Paint It Black," whose script she co-wrote from the Janet Fitch novel:"We actually got some great news about it. I can't say right now."

Stay tuned.

Author talk with Amber Tamblyn, 4 p.m. Saturday, Bank Square Books, 53 West Main St., Mystic; (860) 536-3795.