The thing I tell people is that my novel Barbara is about an actress narrating her life in the decades after WWII. I like how these seemingly simple markers of who and when, ‘actress’ and ‘after the war’ get very complicated once you start handling them.
If I have more than the length of the proverbial elevator ride, I add that it’s about atomic science and cinema, the places where the long shadow of the mushroom cloud and the blinding light of the film projector meet. I say it’s about different kinds of light modern society shines on the world. It’s about people devoting their lives to different kinds of production: making bombs, making movies, making selves.
I listened to a lot of music while writing this. I assembled my soundtrack and then replayed the songs obsessively. Listening helped me feel the time I was trying to conjure. And because it was a time before I was born, media— recordings, along with movies and photographs— was one of my ways in.
My main character, the narrator who is and isn’t named Barbara, is older than the baby boomers. I thought a lot about her generation, or rather her lack of clean markers that have to do with our current versions of cultural history.
The baby boomers are the archetypal generation of the American Century. My husband likes to argue that generations are arbitrary categories dreamed up by ad executives and therefore, meaningless. I agree with one aspect of his point, but want to argue with his conclusions. Generations can be both artificial and meaningful.
Part of what I find fascinating about generations is how they necessitate an edge and thus, create an in group and out. There is such a thing as the archetypal middle class baby boomer, who watched the Beatles on TV at the appropriate tender age and felt that it was they were being sung to directly. But if that figure exists, so too does the one too young, or too old to fully appreciate the charm of what the mass market was whipping up. I am drawn to characters that belong to this edge or space between. The ones too young to have understood the war, but old enough to feel the traumas of the adults around them.
- Just Like In The Movies (Don’t Turn Your Back on Me, Jackie DeShannon, 1964)
Jackie DeShannon, born in 1941, is just such an outsider. She’s born five years before the oldest boomer. An older sister who lived through the war. She’s a singer and composer that you know without perhaps realizing you do. She opened for the Beatles’ North American tour in 1964. She’s the one singing “What the World Needs Now is Love” and “Needles and Pins” on oldies stations and she wrote many songs that became hits, including ‘Bette Davis Eyes’, which didn’t break through until 1981, even though it was written in 1974. And yet, even with this long career and gold records, she still feels hidden. Her voice rises up through the cracks, perfectly teen pop but somehow lonely. She falls somewhere between girl group glimmer and singer songwriter flowers. She is neither, or both simultaneously.
- Our Love Will Still Be There (From Nowhere, The Troggs, 1966)
Whereas Jackie is ever so subtly out of step, The Troggs are emblematic, they belong to their generation. These British boys promise that even after society has collapsed, after the apocalypse of war, their love, our love, will remain.
- Come Away Melinda (Local Gentry, Bobbie Gentry 1968)
- Nostalgia (Sixties’ Best Greek Pop Songs Vol. 1, The Charms, 2020)
Come Away Melinda also speaks of a time after. It is written in the voice of a child and a parent, with a book of images between them. The child is excited and mystified by images of an unfamiliar world, while the parent must explain that these images reflect what once was, in the time before the war. In some renditions of this song the singer addresses daddy, Bobbie Gentry’s version speaks to her mother. Through the narrative of the song we learn that many things ‘before the war’ were different. No matter how many times I’ve listened, I cannot tell if I am imposing the image of disfigurement, death and a child being raised in isolation, or if these realities are what the song implies. It is a Rorschach test of an anti-war song.
BARBARA takes the narrative shape of a spiral. We start in the actress’s present, when she’s around forty years old and filming a Western in the 1970s. She then goes back in time to tell the story of her life. However, because of her profession as a film actress, her version of historical time also jumps depending on the films she’s working on. In some periods, she’s artistically inhabiting early Christian Europe and in another phase she’s in the gothic Victoriana of Dracula.
- Nights in White Satin (Days of Future Passed, The Moody Blues, 1967)
- Me and The Wine and the City Lights (Cowboy in Sweden, Lee Hazlewood, 1970)
- Accidentally Like a Martyr (Excitable Boy, Warren Zevon, 1978)
I wanted to write something that felt like watching a film. That is not to say I was trying to write a screenplay, but rather I wanted it to exist in the reader’s mind like films do.
I was thinking of directors like Robert Altman or Michelangelo Antonioni and how they create feelings through style. The sensations seem to be much more important than the story. They are telling you things through color, through the quality of sound or light. Obviously it’s hard, or impossible to do what a film does in a novel, but I liked the challenge. I thought it might have something to do with the collision of time. I thought it might also have to do with how they allow you to see the artifice of their project. They know you know that they are making a movie. They know you are watching.
- Goldberg Variations BWV 988: Variation 13 a 2 Clav. (Johann Sebastian Bach, Glenn Gould, 1959)
- Ne Me Quitte Pas (La Valse A Mille Temps (Vol. 4) Jacques Brel, 1959)
If I am passing on music and some thoughts about Barbara here, then I am trying to give you a feeling. When you listen to Glenn Gould playing Bach, you can hear Gould. His humming, the physical act of him playing the piano, feels intimately present. Each time I write a sentence I wonder how it connects to the last.
I want to make you feel a sensation analogous to watching Cassavetes and Falk and Gazarria in Husbands. They are so loud and boisterous and manic, I guess whether you like listening to it or vicariously experiencing that kind of male friendship, but I just find it so emotionally resonant.
Gould is one of those figures I consider very famous, but that perception may have been influenced by living in Canada and consuming a lot of CBC content and Canadian documentaries. Gould, like Jacqueline du Pre, communicates a particular delicacy, a star quality through their playing.
They are like actors in a classical theater. Who toy with that tension between disappearing into the material and revealing themselves with the material that they interpret.
- Albuquerque- Live (Neil Young Archives Vol. II, Neil Young, 1972-1976)
- Into the Mystic- Live (It’s Too Late to Stop Now, Van Morrison, 1974)
As I was writing I often listened to artists who have distinctive, singular voices as their calling cards. The perfectly imperfect voice— like Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, or Jacques Brel— gave me the right inspiration. Live recordings add another layer of texture to these already bristly characters. You hear individual performers in situ. Sometimes they sound hung over, other times angry and still others you can tell they are filled with joy and riding the wave of their time on stage. You hear the crackle of space and, deliciously, that tension between audience and performer.
Neil Young, born in Toronto in 1945, sings about Albuquerque and Santa Fe as an escape from fame; while Morrison, born the same year in Belfast, sings of ancient time and sailing as if it is the most sensual thing in the world. This song, like Nights in White Satin, makes me think of the kind of medieval, fairy tale aesthetic that threads through the 1960s and 1970s. God I love it.
- You Know More Than I Know (Fear, John Cale, 1974)
The book moves through time and space. The characters spend time in cars and planes. The narrator spends time in Colorado and Connecticut, New York, Paris, Athens, and the Alps as a film actress would do. Through all this her voice, her perspective as an American woman remains a constant. I wanted to include in my soundtrack pieces that spoke to her western roots, such as they are. But I also wanted to bring in the shimmer of rootless travel.
The task of making the playlist and telling you about the book and the music is a delicate balance. In that I want the playlist to feel good to listen to, more than I have words for each particular piece.
- Long Black Veil (Long Black Veil single, Lefty Frizzell, 1959)
- La Maison où j’ai Grandi (La Maison où j’ai Grandi, François Hardy 1966)
- Time of the Preacher (Red Headed Stranger, Willie Nelson, 1975)
If you read the book I hope you’ll hear both Willie Nelson and Francois Hardy. BARBARA is a place where they both make sense. Nelson was born in 1933 in Abbot, Texas. Hardy was born in Paris, France, in 1944.
Perhaps you sense my obsession with birth year and place? I got into the habit while writing the book because it was a way to locate people in relation to historical currents. What codes and stories are embedded in towns and dates? It folds back into all the generation talk.
- Didn’t I ((Listen To My Song single, B-side, Darondo, 1972)
- Baby It’s You (Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow, The Shirelles, 1960)
- The End of the World (The Myth of Skeeter Davis, Skeeter Davis, 1957)
- La Mort De L’enfant (The Naked Island, Hikaru Hayashi, 1961)
I imagine Abbott Texas, twenty-four miles north of Waco, and what it must have been like in ’33, the year Franklin D. Rosevelt was inaugurated president in Washington D.C. That same year Adolf Hitler became Germany’s chancellor.
I think about Paris in 1944. Each song is a universe. Francois sings about her friends who ask why she cries. Her friends in the song say she’s lucky and famous and can travel the world, but Francois sings about the house of her childhood, which has disappeared without a trace. It’s been eaten up by the expanding city. When I listen I have to concentrate hard to make sense of the lyrics through their veil of French, which is not my mother tongue, but still they make me cry.
- Stars (Live at Montreux Jazz Festival, Nina Simone, 1976)
- Famine Disaster 1974, (Jerusalem, Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, 2023)
My friend Stephanie and I joke about porosity quite often. We both consider it central to our art, our conceptions of the world. Stephanie grew up in Miami, where water comes from every angle, it falls as rain, laps as waves, it bubbles up from storm drains and hangs in the air as humidity. I, on the other hand, grew up in New Mexico, a land that takes more moisture than it gives. But still, it’s a place that makes you feel the quality of your body in relation to the world. Stephanie and I long ago bonded because we love the flows between inside and out, work and play, politics and art. Maybe porosity has to do with femininity. Tears are so important to making art, for me as it is for Stephanie.
I wrote and cried. Listened and cried. I chose songs that made me feel things. Actors can cry for real but also on cue. The blur of rehearsing and performing, seeing and feeling. Style and content are inextricable.
- Mes Ta Oneira Mou- Canzone (Sixties’ Best Greek Pop Songs Vol. 1, Mary Alexopoulou, Athanasios Tsongas, 2020)
- Flowers in the Pond (Ros Serey Sothea, 1970)
I suppose the reason I write this is because there’s a voice in my head, that exists out in the culture as well, that demands answers about plot, or message. What are you trying to say? I might be the one asking myself that, or some skeptical teacher from my past could be the one voicing this issue.
We’re all now subject to a lot of talk about efficiency, bullet points, and boiling it down. I feel like this kind of talk fucks with us. I want to push against it. What I hope I leave you with in this meditation on music and my novel is a feeling, a sensation. Music gives us ephemeral sensations that cannot be summarized. The best films have that same quality.
- La Plat Pays (Olympia 64, Jacques Brel, 1964)
When I think of a movie like The Long Goodbye or Husbands, Wanda or The Passenger, the actions are not the point. All I could tell you is that each has a feeling and it passes through and around you as you watch. Things happen. Time passes. It passes both in the actual length of the movie, and also in the length of time covered in the story. Maybe a few Parisian hours like Cleo from 5 to 7, or maybe a slow Texas year like in The Last Picture Show. But what happens in that is not exactly temporal. It’s a song, or a tone of voice, the shine of a red Naugahyde bar booth or a particular quality of late, slanting winter light in the afternoon. That is the point of the picture. That is the porosity I’m after.
Joni Murphy’s playlist for her novel Double Teenage