"Real, deep processing of both social and personal grief rather than escapism"

I think it was in 2017, in San Francisco, at Dog-Eared Books or at Adobe Books, that I first discovered Joni Murphy’s writing. At one of those bookstores or somewhere else, maybe, I found Double Teenage, a novel I remember as a mood and a feeling, which drew me in with the sunset colors of its cover and its title, which seemed to reach into my mind and stroke some preoccupation I had with my own past. Double Teenage is the story of Celine and Julie, two friends growing up in the Nineties in New Mexico. But it is also the story of their world—or rather, it is a story about how Celine and Julie’s stories are inextricably linked to larger narratives.

“Individuals matter, but we’re all embedded in systems and structures. They/ we belong to a world of connections in which we’re told these connections don’t exist. Only when a pattern is overwhelmingly horrific does it get recognized as a pattern,” Murphy said in a thrillingly titled interview about Double Teenage, “I Like The Triangulation of Various Wests.”

I can no longer see the first message I wrote Joni on Instagram, introducing myself and my ardent fascination with her fiction. But I can see that she wrote back. In 2018 she contributed “Sky Blue and Green” to 7X7LA, where I was then an editor, in collaboration with the writer Leah Horowitz. Two years later, she sent me her second novel, Talking Animals, a dreamlike and lonely story about a New York populated by anthropomorphized animals and buckling under the weight of its own capitalist dysfunction.

Joni’s new novel Barbara, her third, is a transfixing object, a story told in the voice of an invented actress, a blonde beauty who carries within her the destruction and darkness of the twentieth century—and, perhaps, a warning of the cruelty of the twenty-first. I loved the textures and spaces of this book, its strangeness and confidence, the worlds it so completely imagines: summer stock in 1950s Connecticut, Paris in the early Sixties, a maid’s room where Barbara slips between abject girl identities as she lays chainsmoking in a twin bed made up with rose-printed sheets.

Barbara is perhaps the most honest and powerful fiction I’ve read about mourning parents since my mother died in 2020.

Today, I’m excited to share an interview with Joni about Barbara. I felt so happy when I received the answers to these questions, which dig into the roots of this powerful, sad, and unforgettable book.

This Friday, May 2, I’m honored to be in conversation with Joni Murphy her and the writer Anna Dorn about the book at Official Welcome, a new gallery in Los Angeles. Joni has designed a unique intervention on the book launch eent, in which she will give a lecture and Anna and I will both be presenting responses to Barbara rather than a conventional reading followed by Q&A.

Doors are at 6:30, and the event begins at 7 PM at Official Welcome, located in The Granada Building, 672 S La Fayette Park Place, Suite 46, Los Angeles, CA 90057.

RSVP for our event by sending an email to [email protected]. 

Joni Murphy is a writer from Las Cruces, New Mexico who lives in New York City.

In addition to her three novels, she has created sound art and performance, written about culture and visual art, and sustained herself with often dispiriting jobs. In her youth she produced chapbooks and zines.

She has presented work at ACRE Projects and Sector 2337 in Chicago, Darling Foundarie in Montreal, VIVO Media Arts Centre in Vancouver, Resonance FM in the UK, and with Sound Development City in Belgrade and Athens.

Her writing has been published by Brick, Color Magazine, The Capilano Review, Canadian Art, Malaspina Printmakers, and the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, among others.

Tell me about how Barbara came to be. What was the genesis of the book, where did it come from, how did it become itself?

One answer is that my father was born and raised in Los Alamos, New Mexico. He was an engineer as was my grandfather and both of them spent their lives working for the government labs. My parents' shelves were full of books about nuclear development, the cold war, and modern American history. My father was somewhat entranced by the legacy of the Manhattan Project in a professional and also intimate way. It has a magnetic power, conceptually. Over the years, when I’ve mentioned Los Alamos to others, I’ve often encountered a subtle reaction, a complex curiosity, repulsion and fascination. I feel it in myself. That place, the home of the atomic bomb as it's called, has an aura. There’s something undigested and indigestible about what nuclear weapons mean to and for modernity. It’s an impossible subject. In some sense, I’m probably a writer because of my family's home in this remote town in northern New Mexico.

One of Barbara’s shimmering threads is parent loss. When the book opens, we learn that the protagonist’s father has recently died, and that her mother died by suicide in her childhood; grief shapes her character, experiences, and art. You lost your father five years ago. How did that experience intersect with the creation of the book? What elements of your own grief influenced this world, and which were generated within and for it?

My father died about six months before Covid began. So I slid through a period of personal, internal, family grief right into one of, if not the strangest period of our age. In the fall of 2019 I was grieving but then the world was ‘normal’. Then, in 2020, as I was coming out of that heaviest personal period, society was thrown into this chaos defined by illness, death, and a paranoia that perhaps this was “the end” in some way. I spent 2020 in a tucked away part of Greenpoint, Brooklyn that felt then like a village, taking circling walks and thinking about my dad, and then at night watching movies with my husband. The only films I could bear to watch in that period were heavy. I needed genuinely adult works that had something serious to communicate. I was drawn to films that seemed to represent real, deep processing of both social and personal grief rather than escapism. I first saw Elem Klimov’s anti-war film Come and See, as well as Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun, Passolini’s Salo, Cassavetes’s Opening Night to name just a few, in that period. One would hardly call these comfort watches but the honesty that they contained, I found really grounding and helpful. Grief and trauma, the perpetration of violence and the suffering from it shapes the United States, but the country also seems especially bad at processing or moving through this reality. Writing this book was my small way of trying to touch, to make art out of, to contend with the personal and collective grief I see woven into reality.

In your acknowledgements, you thank “Ariana Reines and the Invisible College community,” calling Barbara “a product of that mystical and inspiring school.” Can you talk more about the connection between Invisible College and this novel?

This also goes back to 2020. That first spring of Covid, the poet Ariana Reines started Invisible College, which is a class, a study group focused on, broadly speaking, sacred texts. We first gathered around Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Over time we also studied The Book of Innana, The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley, and A Changing Light at Sandover by James Merrill. Invisible College, from 2020 all the way to this winter has been a constant, and so helpful in my writing and thinking. Ariana herself is so brilliant, and just one part of her genius is the recognition that so many people were starved for a porous yet somewhat private space to write and think and speak from the heart with art and poetry as an organizing principle. She fostered it and models both within the Invisible College space, and in her own writing a very rigorous form of self inquiry but also a trust and support of other people. I could say practically that Invisible College helped me foster the bubble of time I needed to write the book, but it's deeper than that. It’s the place where I was able to feel afresh that language is a spiritual material.

Your first novel, Double Teenage, follows the lives of two young women as they become themselves; your second, Talking Animals, investigates NYC corruption and despair from the perspective of an alpaca and a llama. Is there a story you tell yourself about these books together, how they proceed from one another? How did one thing lead to another? Or: did one thing lead to another?

I spent a lot of of my mid-twenties immersed in the study of European modernism generally and the work of Walter Benjamin specifically and I guess that marked me as a fiction writer. On of the things I took away from all this was how children, animals, women, non-western people were often grouped together or used to describe and define one another in contrast with the “rational” adult man. All these beings are turned into things, they are objectified, they cross boundaries within the western imaginary. Women are so often aligned with something animalistic or “natural.” Children and animals are also aligned so often through literature. I’m just fascinated by roles and I think that’s what links all my work. My first book was about two young women investigating the constrictive form of “young women.” Though I think people see the book as quite a departure, Talking Animals is about an internal recognition we all feel that we are living beings, we are animals, but are compelled by capitalism, to ignore our impulses and participate in a society that’s actively destructive to the earth and continued existence. Then Barbara, this most recent book, is also about internal tension between performing and living, seeing oneself as a being and also an image. So to me, various forms of objectification, or consciousness strained through the sieve of non-dominant consciousness, is the through line.

Was there a most surprising thing about writing this book?

I have been surprised at how much I feel like this actress, the narrator exists. Partly because the title is a name, I find my friends and I slip into an intimate mode when talking about Barbara. She’s here, yet absent. She has come to exist and it feels like she doesn’t need me anymore. This breaks my heart. But it also makes me feel like a magician who believes in their own trick, and that feels embarrassing but also so sweet and satisfying.

Thank you for reading. Stay safe, everyone, and rest well.