Raised as a member of LDS Church,[2] she continued her piano studies at Brigham Young University from 1961 to 1964 and married David Barber in 1964.
[3][4][5] Barber's first published book was Smiley Snake's Adventure (1980), an easy reader commissioned by a small press in Provo.
[3][7] Barber describes her writing process as being similar to learning to play a piece of music on the piano.
[10]: 161 The borders of outside and inside are important metaphors for how Barber interacts with expectations from her church and parents about how she will live her life.
[11]: 172 In How I Got Cultured, Barber also recalled her experience of wanting to be both sexually attractive and chaste.
[11]: 175–177 Bush compares Barber to Terry Tempest Williams and Juanita Brooks—two other professional Mormon women autobiographers from the twentieth century who write in a literary style, with ironic chapter names and rich metaphors.
[11]: 187–188 Williams and Barber have further similarities in their memoirs in that they reconstruct dialogue, show mistakes in government actions, and use irony to explore religious orthodoxy.
[11]: 189–190 Bush praised How I Got Cultured for the way it dealt with the serious issue of Mormon and Western expectations of girls and women with humor and without didacticism.
"[13] Mary Ellen Robertson, in a review for Dialogue, wrote that Parting the Veil reminded readers of their "collective belief in miracles, the potency of our oral traditions, and our persistent efforts to part the veil that separates us from the divine.
He compared her stories to those by Orson Scott Card and Levi Peterson, stating that their work "allows for the reality of sacred experience and the possibility of bumping into beings of light.
"[16]: 43 In 1993, Lavina Fielding Anderson discussed Barber's work in a reflective essay about the state of Mormon women's fiction.
Anderson praised The Desert Shall Blossom for the way Barber interpreted Mormonism; "neither pietistically nor simplistically".
[17] At 15 Bytes, Jake Clayson spoke positively of Barber's writing in her memoir To The Mountain, describing it as self-aware and disarming.
[7][6] And the Desert Shall Blossom and "Criminal Justice" won first prizes in the 1988 Utah State Literary Competition.
[3] Barber left the LDS Church for twenty years and researched other faith traditions in that time, which she wrote about in her memoir.