Behind the Chapter with Joni Murphy
Today, we invite Joni Murphy to the blog to share thoughts on a chapter from her new novel Barbara! Read on for insights into the inspirations and questions that led Joni to draft a passage that begins on page 69 of her book. Take it away Joni!
Page 69-82
Although I did not envision writing a section like this when I was first working on Barbara, it has come to be one of the most important. In these pages, the narrator is swept up in a brief romance, gets pregnant and then has an illegal abortion. The intimate yet mundane violence and gore provides the first shock to the reader and I think it spills over and colours the more simple, restrained things that happen after. It works like a kind of horror story.
Growing up and living in the U.S. has both sensitized and inured me to the state’s grotesque treatment of women. To pay full attention to either political party’s cynical deployment of ambient and blatant misogyny and gendered anxiety, is to court insanity. No one I know can focus fully, because there’s too much. There have been moments in the recent past when you could trick yourself into thinking the country had moved, changed, but the last few years dispelled that fantasy. Although different state governments had been chipping away at the right to abortion for decades, the 2022 Supreme court ruling that there is no federal constitutional right to abortion, destroyed the whole façade.
In the time of the chapter, it’s the early 1960s, but in my heart as a writer, it is now. The chapter details how some careless, swoony sex with an older man in the back of a car, leads to an emotionally taxing, physically hazardous quest for answers and money and the right contacts to procure a backroom abortion.
The Lucia Berlin story “Tiger Bites” from A Manual for Cleaning Women was an inspiration to me because the characters weren’t precious about abortions. The characters in that story are emotional and young and overwhelmed but also funny and charming and confused. The women in this story think and talk about babies but also themselves. They think about abortions and don’t turn into stock characters in a morality play.
Though people can feel whatever they feel about the prospect of real-life abortions, I am personally allergic to a maudlin version of the story that feels all too common. I don’t even know where this version comes from (Maybe movies? Maybe TV?) but I have in my head the image of a girl deeply saddened by the necessity of an abortion, a young woman haunted by visions of the baby that will never be. I needed to write something about a young woman preoccupied with herself, her own well-being, and ambitions for life. I needed to write also about how those feelings and her physical reality collided with the state, forcing her into a mundane yet grotesque shadow area where more bad things could, all too easily, happen. I needed to describe how an act of self preservation becomes grungy and humiliating and painful solely because it has been outlawed.
Rather than emphasizing the spiraling parallels of then and now in the book, I let the fictional actress’s journey remain her own, intimate and lonely and strange. However, I, as the writer, am all too aware. When I look at the news from just the recent past, headlines such as these flash and disappear amidst the roiling waves: “GOP lawmakers push to charge women with homicide for seeking abortions”…“Texas woman died after being denied miscarriage care due to abortion ban, report finds”… “Investigation links Georgia’s abortion ban to preventable deaths of 2 women”. I would love for this section of my novel to feel bound within history, as if it spoke of a different time, but I don’t think it does. It doesn’t to me.
