This short, beautiful and sober book has its starting point in the commission that Nathalie Léger receives to write the entry on the actress and director Barbara Loden for a film dictionary. Soon enough, the author finds herself incapable of writing a dispassionate and objective article about Loden, and her own experiences and the lives of her mother and mugger Alma Malone begin to become intertwined with the filmmaker's biography. All of them converge in the figure of Wanda, the main character in the film of the same name, the only film that Loden directed and starred in a decade before her premature death.

In her attempt to unravel the enigma of Barbara Loden's life and work, following her elusive tracks, the narrator –and with her, the reader– will begin an investigation that will take her from the French Riviera to New York and the mining region of the Pennsylvania state; a journey that goes through several generations of women whose sole purpose is to emancipate themselves and grow apart from the world of men, to recover a space that has always been usurped from them.

In these pages, Nathalie Léger suggestively combines the biography with the novel and the essay, and she does so with a reflective and ironic prose, contained and emotional at the same time. In search of the ghost of Barbara Loden, Léger manages to blur the boundaries between reality and fiction and offers us a memorable work on the pressing need of women to find the way and means to express themselves.

"This remarkable book manages to encompass it all: it is at once literary criticism, biography, memoir, film history, and even fiction."
The New Yorker