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 movie making.

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 commits 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 Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys and Y: Oppenheimer, Horseman of Los Alamos