Barbara

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 polesthe historic and the personal, the political and the violently intimatevie for control of Barbaras 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 rolesvampires 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 Murphys 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 genresfrom austere 1950s family dramas to countercultural 1970s gothicsglimpsing herself in the reflective and deadly shards of the long 20th Century.