Barbara by Joni Murphy

From the author of Double Teenage and Talking Animals comes an intimate portrait of a woman losing and finding her identity through the business and art of moviemaking.

Barbara is born just before World War II to a tragically beautiful mother and a father who becomes an engineer in the famous Manhattan Project. When Barbara is thirteen, her mother dies by suicide. These realities of war and personal loss shape her consciousness going forward.

She grows up to become an actress, restlessly travelling the world between film sets and love affairs, from the Bronx to Athens, the Alps to the Rocky Mountains. Navigating decades and genres, Barbara moves from austere 1950s kitchen sink dramas to countercultural 1970s gothics. She takes on and sheds many roles, temporarily becoming a vampire’s victim and a stylish mistress, a martyred saint and a bored housewife. She enjoys clandestine sexual encounters and endures an illegal abortion; she marries, divorces, and remarries, the second time to a visionary director who proves to be her great love.

An intense, layered distillation of a zeitgeist, Joni Murphy’s latest novel whispers tales of independent cinema and grimy show business, militarism and physics, bomb making and image consumption. It is a study of the mirroring and splitting between old and new worlds, inner sensations, and outward performance. Ultimately, Barbara unspools a delicate yet propulsive tale of a woman grasping for a meaningful life amid the reflective, broken shards of the long 20th century.

Praise for Barbara

“A masterful and vivid psychobiography of an actress who comes to know the whole world. Murphy’s heroine sublimely describes the conditions of her own subjugation, and her simultaneous ascension to the peak of pure art. This text feels channeled by a writer at the peak too. Her empiric eye-opening pierces every single page.” —Tamara Faith Berger, author of Yara 

“Barbara threads generational violence, intimate and societal, through the eye of its title protagonist, where the novel is both focused to a pinpoint, actorly movements through a set, and made as expansive as a desert landscape rendered barren by atomic testing. Yet, there is much hope in Barbara, warm and intelligent, complex and always engaging, and in her story, one that wanders independently and fiercely, in the face of headwind forces and histories.” —Aaron Tucker, author of Y: Oppenheimer, Horseman of Los Alamos

“Barbara is an American girl with a black hole at her centre, a maid smoking out a bathroom window, a vampiric film director, a perfect and suicidal mother, the patron saint of miners and bomb-makers. Moving an unmapped course through time and fictions, Joni Murphy’s Barbara opens dimensions behind the actor’s returning stare.” —Deragh Campbell, actress and filmmaker

“This book is like a hologram—an image, an image, an image, pointing through inner and outer spaces, through time, to the silhouette of a woman who lived once, in three dimensions, and who will live on in every reader’s memory. Beautiful and radioactive and sly.” —Sean Michaels, author of Do You Remember Being Born?

“Barbara is an entrancing novel of contrapuntal virtuosity. Its time signatures—the present tense of cinema, the radioactive half-lives of geopolitics and memory, the ticking time-bomb by which a woman comes to know herself—reflect the Twentieth Century as we have never really known it. An actress’s memoir—the interior life of a gazed-upon woman—makes film itself seem to flicker against a mushroom cloud: Murphy’s Sebaldian gaze keep art and catastrophe close. Uncannily alive, Barbara gets under your skin. As I read I thought of all my favorite movies and books—yet it remains unlike anything else I know.” —Ariana Reines, author of Wave of Blood 

“Sensuous and sexy, vivid and tactile—Barbara is one of the most beautifully written novels I’ve read in a long time. In it, Joni Murphy expertly captures both the melancholic pains and the hedonistic pleasures of a life spent making art.” —Laura Adamczyk, author of Hardly Children 

Press Coverage

25 books to read in 2025 —Jean Marc Ah-Sen, Toronto Star