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.

About the Author
Joni Murphy is a writer from New Mexico who lives in New York. Her debut novel, Double Teenage, was published in 2016. It was named one of the Globe and Mail's 100 Best Books of 2016. Her second novel, Talking Animals, was published in 2020 from FSG Originals.

Reviews
"Barbrara 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



Book Information
ISBN 9781662602870
Author Joni Murphy
Format Hardback
Page Count 240
Imprint Astra House
Publisher Astra Publishing House