An essayistic novel on the complexities of agency versus passivity in the collective female psyche emerges the product of Léger’s unwavering fascination with Barbara Loden and her mostly overlooked work. In her 2011 novel, Suite for Barbara Loden (a brilliant blend of biographical fiction and nonfiction) Nathalie Léger examines how her own life overlaps with Loden’s and Alma’s, through the prism of the filmmaker’s first and only film. In the film, Loden plays Wanda as she stumbles numbly through a series of difficult situations with what appears to be total complacency: forfeiting custody of her children to her husband, swapping nights on her sister’s couch for strangers’ beds, and, eventually, agreeing to a lover’s scheme to rob a bank. She thanked the judge for the sentence, a detail that inspired Barbara Loden’s 1970 film, Wanda. Nearly 60 years ago, The Sunday Daily News published the story of Alma Malone, a woman from rural Appalachia condemned to life in prison as an accomplice to a robbery. I first held Suite for Barbara Loden in my aunt’s living room on Christmas Eve, but it wasn’t until I was back home in New York five weeks later that I began to read this book, which has traveled with me for a while and in a sense, the story it tells has been traveling for even longer.
The book boarded a flight to Paris, then traveled the 400-and-some miles between Charles De Gaulle airport and Roodt-sur-Syre, Luxembourg. When the postwoman delivered Suite for Barbara Lodento my mailbox, I was not at home. This post was produced in partnership with Bloom, a literary site that features authors whose first books were published when they were 40 or older.
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