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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