Like Nolan’s Oppenheimer by way of Lucia Berlin, a radiant novel tracking the lifecycle of a silver screen starlet rising against the backdrop of the Atomic Age.
Barbara is born shortly before World War II and lives through the conflict as a desert child trailing her father, an engineer in the famed and infamous Manhattan Project. When Barbara is thirteen, her beautiful, sensitive mother commits suicide. From that point on, these twin poles—the historic and the personal, the political and the violently intimate—vie for control of Barbara’s consciousness.
As Barbara grows up and becomes a successful actress, traveling the world between film sets and love affairs, she takes on and sheds various roles—vampire’s victim and frontier prostitute; a saint and a bored housewife. She marries and divorces and marries again, the second time to a visionary director who proves to be the love of her life. Though they are not faithful to each other, their relationship provides the most enduring anchor in a remarkable life turbulent with fiction.
Joni Murphy’s Barbara is a deep character study of a woman losing hold and recapturing her identity through the art and technology of moviemaking. Through an intimate first-person perspective, the novel follows Barbara as she navigates decades and genres—from austere 1950s family dramas to countercultural 1970s gothics—glimpsing herself in the reflective and deadly shards of the long 20th Century.
Barbara is born shortly before World War II and lives through the conflict as a desert child trailing her father, an engineer in the famed and infamous Manhattan Project. When Barbara is thirteen, her beautiful, sensitive mother commits suicide. From that point on, these twin poles—the historic and the personal, the political and the violently intimate—vie for control of Barbara’s consciousness.
As Barbara grows up and becomes a successful actress, traveling the world between film sets and love affairs, she takes on and sheds various roles—vampire’s victim and frontier prostitute; a saint and a bored housewife. She marries and divorces and marries again, the second time to a visionary director who proves to be the love of her life. Though they are not faithful to each other, their relationship provides the most enduring anchor in a remarkable life turbulent with fiction.
Joni Murphy’s Barbara is a deep character study of a woman losing hold and recapturing her identity through the art and technology of moviemaking. Through an intimate first-person perspective, the novel follows Barbara as she navigates decades and genres—from austere 1950s family dramas to countercultural 1970s gothics—glimpsing herself in the reflective and deadly shards of the long 20th Century.
Book Details
Price:
14.99 USD
Published: 2025-03-25
ISBN: 9781662602887
Page Count: 272
Trim Size: 5-1/2 x 8-1/4
"Barbara examines the masks we assume and the lies we tell ourselves to muddle through life . . . Murphy’s even-keeled prose smooths Barbara’s recollections into one hypnotic narrative. Even though Barbara tells us there is no climax to her story, we read on, expecting an explosion."
—Grace Byron, BOMB
"Joni Murphy’s blisteringly beautiful third novel Barbara traces her titular protagonist’s relationship to the atomic bomb, acting, and an assortment of affairs . . . [A] captivating book about the performance of femininity, the illusory magic of cinema, and the geopolitical landscape of mid-20th century America."
—Hannah Bonner, Hyperallergic
"Restless and inquisitive, Barbara is acutely sensitive to time, irony, the zeitgeist, metaphorical dimensions of filmmaking and nuclear physics, and power dynamics personal and professional. Murphy’s atmospheric, Didionesque portrait of a creatively brilliant and cruelly underestimated 'permanent outsider' is exquisitely perceptive and lushly resonant."
—Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
"Elegant . . . The prose, particularly the descriptions of acting and filmmaking, is exceptional. Readers will enjoy this atmospheric work."
—Publishers Weekly
"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 . . . Uncannily alive, Barbara gets under your skin."
—Ariana Reines, author of A Sand Book
“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 Island City and Hardly Children
“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 American girl with a black hole at her center, 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