She garnered attention with her 1988 illustrated novel The Good Times are Killing Me, about an interracial friendship between two young girls, which was adapted into a play.

[8] Linda Jean Barry, who changed her first name to "Lynda" at age 12,[9] was born on Highway 14 in Richland Center, Wisconsin.

[10] Barry grew up in Seattle, Washington, in a racially mixed working-class neighborhood,[11] and recalls her childhood as difficult and awkward.

[9] By age 16, she was working nights as a janitor at a Seattle hospital while still attending high school, where her classmates included artist Charles Burns.

[13] At The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, Barry met fellow cartoonist Matt Groening.

[16] Barry also credits her start in comics to Evergreen State professor Marilyn Frasca, saying, "The lessons I learned from her when I was 19 and 20, I still use every day and have never been able to wear out.

[12] As she described her career start:[Editor] Bob Roth called me from the Chicago Reader as the result of an article [her college classmate] Matt [Groening] wrote about hip West Coast artists — he threw me in just because he was a buddy, right?

[11]Collections of her work include Girls & Boys (1981), Big Ideas (1983), Everything in the World (1986), The Fun House (1987), Down the Street (1989), and The Greatest of Marlys (2000).

In answering a question about her book What It Is in an interview with Michael Dean for The Comics Journal,[19] Barry said: There were big realizations and small ones.

Barry addressed the violence in the book in an interview with Hillary Chute in The Believer,[25] saying: Cruddy has murder galore.

Alanna Nash wrote in The New York Times that "the author's ability to capture the paralyzing bleakness of despair, and her uncanny ear for dialogue, make this first novel a work of terrible beauty.

"[26] In The Austin Chronicle, Stephen MacMillan Moser wrote a review in the form of a letter to Barry, saying "You blew me away.

"[28] Berry wrote in her summary of the paper that the book is "a vivid example of what I call 'gothic posthumanism' in which gothic themes and tropes serve to advance an extensive critique of anthropo‐ and other centrisms, all forms of domination, the values of liberal humanism and affirmative conformist culture."

Berry analyzes Cruddy using a theory of posthuman ethics articulated by Rosi Braidotti, writing that she used Braidotti's theory "to analyze Roberta's survival strategies and her radically posthuman identification with animals centering on their shared vulnerability and thus their shared goal: to disappear and to survive."

first appeared as a serialized comic on Salon.com;[29] according to the book's introduction, it was produced in emulation of an old Zen painting exercise called "one hundred demons".

The demons Barry wrestles with in this book include regret, abusive relationships, self-consciousness, the prohibition against feeling hate, and her response to the results of the 2000 U.S. presidential election.

Making Comics, What It Is, Picture This, and Syllabus: Notes From an Accidental Professor focus on opening pathways to personal creativity.

Publishers Weekly gave Syllabus a starred review, calling it "an excellent guide for those seeking to break out of whatever writing and drawing styles they have been stuck in, allowing them to reopen their brains to the possibility of new creativity.

"[35] Barry had previously read the essay on Chicago Public Radio's program The Wild Room, which she co-hosted with Ira Glass and Gary Covino.

[36] Barry offers a workshop titled "Writing the Unthinkable" through the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, and The Crossings in Austin, Texas, in which she teaches the process she uses to create all of her work.

[9] She credits her teacher, Marilyn Frasca at The Evergreen State College, with teaching her these creativity and writing techniques.

[citation needed] A New York Times article about her writing workshops summed up her technique: "Barry isn't particularly interested in the writer's craft.

[40] As of 2013, singer and friend Kelly Hogan was working as an assistant for Barry,[41] helping her arrange her teaching schedule.

[42][43] In one episode of Barry's Ernie Pook's Comeek, children are peering in a window of the Hideout nightclub in Chicago, listening to Hogan's band The Wooden Leg.