"Barbara is born shortly before World War II and lives throguh the conflict as a desert child trailing her father, an engineer in the 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 sucessful 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. Singular, stylish, and evocative, Joni Murphy's Barbara is a deep character study of a woman losing hold of and recapturing her identity through the art and technology of moviemaking."--Jacket