Katia Lief’s Invisible Woman is a propulsive and unforgettable literary thriller.
What makes a woman snap? Invisible Woman charts the journey of a once celebrated filmmaker’s awakening as she peers into her past through a crisply focused lens and discovers clues to the unraveling of an old friendship, her career and her marriage.
One morning, Joni Ackerman opens an email that refers to her as a “lost and forgotten” filmmaker. It’s meant to be flattering, but it stings. The same morning, a news story breaks about a legendary movie mogul who preyed on women for years—and Joni is thrust back to a memory of the man’s assault on her then roommate, Val. By day’s end, Joni is mired in remorse for the silence they kept about the attack and doubt not just about how it may have affected her career but also her long marriage to Paul Lovett, a powerhouse producer of the golden age of television. The couple only recently decamped from Los Angeles to New York where Paul’s star continues to rise. Displaced, and with her grown daughters gone, Joni feels poignantly alone.
As she unfurls her story in a first-person narrative, the gaslight that darkened her understanding of how and why she got to where she is now—a lonely wife in a well-heeled empty nest—gradually brightens as revelations from her past surface with startling, blinding clarity. Meanwhile, rising anger overpowers her and she drinks to the point of blackout before finally sobering up. The damage, though, is done, and by the end of the novel a woman is brutalized and a man is dead—but is Joni responsible or is she just an easy target for suspicion?
“Goldberg Variations: Aria,” Johann Sebastian Bach (played by Joel Spiegelman)
Welcome to my eclectic playlist. It begins on a personal note, with a memory that evokes the sweet clarity that comes just before sleep and resumes when you first wake in the morning.
As a child, I’d fall asleep to the sound of my father playing the harpsichord downstairs. All my life I’ve listened to him play in concert halls and on albums, but nothing ever compared to the sweetness of the plucked strings of the gold-detailed black-and-red lacquered custom-made instrument that sat in our living room (the Steinway baby grand lived one room over, in Dad’s study). I’d lie in bed and listen like it was nothing unusual, this concert performed casually, after dinner and baths and stories, just for us.
Joni, the protagonist of Invisible Woman, begins her story in the clarity of morning, with ease and simplicity—kitchen, coffee, a new day. Then she opens her email, reads the news, talks with her husband, and the complexities of the past throw their shadows into the day.
“One of These Things First,” Nick Drake
At the start of Joni’s career she was celebrated as a pioneering filmmaker. Looking back, she’s not sure how she lost hold of that thread. Listening to Nick Drake evokes a sense of what might have been if life had gone a different way.
“Something on Your Mind,” Karen Dalton
Joni spends a lot of time alone, often up after Paul has left for work and in bed before he gets home. It’s into this yawning solitude that she begins to see through veils that have obscured the past. She’s tried to reconnect with her long-lost best friend, Val, but has yet to hear back. Karen Dalton’s sweet ‘n sour heart-twist of a love song feels like the invitation to talk, really talk, that she badly needs.
“Little Green,” Joni Mitchell
Anything and everything by Joni Mitchell is on our Joni’s eternal playlist. Mitchell famously wrote this song for the baby daughter she gave up for adoption when she was a struggling young artist. It resonates with the bittersweet longing that fills our Joni when she thinks about her own absent daughters.
“The Twelfth of Never,” Nina Simone
Joni’s memories of her children’s childhoods pervade her consciousness to the point that she sometimes loses track of where she is in reality. When Nina Simone sings, “I’ll love you till the bluebells forget to bloom,” Joni can see and hear and smell and feel her little girls.
“Sinnerman,” Nina Simone
Because one Nina Simone is never enough, here’s another one that I imagine animates Joni as she runs with her dog through the streets of Dumbo in Brooklyn, past an electric plant, having just learned that her husband is having her watched.
“Why,” Annie Lennox
Stuck between remembering and wanting to forget, Joni struggles with why. Why? Why won’t her Val talk to her when there’s so much to talk about, now that the curtain of silence could finally be pulled off their shared secrets?
“It’s Raining Men,” The Weather Girls
Isolated in a house too big for her, in a city that isn’t home, Joni pulls out the cleaning supplies and blasts “It’s Raining Men” while she vacuums and dusts and drinks her way to a blissful forgetting of everything but the moment. (Joni listens to the Pointer Sisters’ cover of the song, but here’s the fabulous original from The Weather Girls.)
“Recomposed,” Max Richter
Have you listened to Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” lately or ever? To me, it’s one of the most beautiful pieces of music, and one of my favorite interpretations is Max Richter’s “Recomposed” in which he, yup, basically took a masterpiece and made another masterpiece. I hear the wild magnificence of this piece, the swirl of its many parts, as Joni moves through the star-studded party that marks the novel’s denouement.
“I Will Survive,” Gloria Gaynor
Now that the past’s been revisited, reinterpreted, and understood in a new and powerful light, Joni’s life will never be the same. She picks herself up and perseveres. The classic Gloria Gaynor anthem from the seventies that she and Val danced to back when they were in college still resonates today. Put it on, get out of your chair—and dance.