Suite for Barbara Loden

"I believe there is a miracle in Wanda," wrote Marguerite Duras of the only film American actress Barbara Loden ever wrote and directed. "Usually, there is a distance between representation and text, subject and action. Here that distance is completely eradicated." It is perhaps this --miracle--the seeming collapse of fiction and fact--that has made Wanda (1970) a cult classic, and a fascination of artists from Isabelle Huppert to Rachel Kushner to Kate Zambreno. For acclaimed French writer Nathalie Leger, the mysteries of Wanda launched an obsessive quest across continents, into archives, and through mining towns of Pennsylvania, all to get closer to the film and its maker. Suite for Barbara Loden is the magnificent result.

Moving contrapuntally between biography and autofiction, film criticism and anecdote, fact and speculation, Suite for Barbara Loden is a stunning mediation on knowledge and self-knowledge, on the surfaces of life and art, and how we come to truth --a kind of truth --not through facts alone but through acts of the imagination.

"Brilliant little book." --Valeria Luiselli

"Inventive and affecting, it takes both the novel and the biography to new and interesting places."--Eimear McBride