The Slow Bloom of ‘Suite for Barbara Loden’
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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When the postwoman delivered Suite for Barbara Loden to my mailbox, I was not at home. I wasn’t even in the country. The book boarded a flight to Paris, then traveled the 400-and-some miles between Charles De Gaulle airport and Roodt-sur-Syre, Luxembourg. 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.
Nearly 60 years ago, published the story of , a woman from rural Appalachia condemned to life in prison as an accomplice to a robbery. She thanked the judge for the sentence, a detail that inspired’s 1970 film,
