Whip-smart and witty, with a laugh that could fill a newsroom, reporter Olivia Barker died Sunday at home after a four-year battle with breast cancer. She was 40.
Soundly rejected when she pitched diagramming a sentence as her "talent," Barker instead performed a dramatic reading from John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation. She took the stage with her hair coiffed in "a lacquered bouffant that's part Lady Bird Johnson, part Bride of Frankenstein," she wrote.
Barker interviewed all walks of life, from the famous to the infamous, deftly zeroing in on social trends across the nation.
She covered the state of American life as we live it: the decline of courtship; single women co-opting the "bachelor pad"; the stigma that accompanies a woman's single status; the emergence of "hipster dads"; nuances of solidarity across the nation afterHurricane Katrina; attempts at catharsis by those who lost loved ones in 9/11; and shifting sands of public vs. private discourse, thanks to social media "enabling society to raise its metaphorical megaphone," as she wrote.
"When Olivia first joined USA TODAY, she quickly emerged as one of our strongest storytellers. She saw stories everywhere: on the beach, at the vet's office, at her computer or on the New York City subway," says executive editor Susan Weiss, who hired Olivia at age 26. "Olivia could turn just about any topic into sparkling prose; her humor, honesty and compassion shone through."
A glint in her eye, Barker owned the "kids today" beat, from the machinations of Generation Y fitting into the workplace to the march of Millennial culture. "Call them Generation Why," she wrote, describing a surging workforce challenging the stodgy status quo of more formal environs.
"Olivia was truly an editor's dream," says her longtime editor Alison Maxwell. "Her writing sang, and sometimes even felt poetic in a very accessible way. She literally brought her subjects to life with words and had an uncanny ability to craft stories that allowed the reader to feel, see, smell and taste, just like they were there."
"She would beg for the craziest assignments," says Kim Willis, Barker's first editor at USA TODAY. "She would light up at the prospect of traipsing through Peoria in full Sex and the City regalia or spending spring break at The Price Is Right. She brought an infectious sense of joy to everything she did."
She covered it all, from mega-watt celebrities spanning Brad Pitt and Scarlett Johansson to media darlings Jon Stewart and Helen Gurley Brown.
Olivia "frequently sat front-row at New York Fashion Week, but embodied none of the stereotypical fashionista attitude," Maxwell recalls. "Kind, gentle and perennially sunny, Olivia always angled to cover the Oscar de la Renta show. And it was the perfect fit — classy, creative and sophisticated — just like she was."
Fashion coverage was one of Barker's fortes. She could spot a trend bubbling months before it hit the mainstream. She uncovered the men's cropped pants trend, followed our fickle fixation on skinny jeans vs. wide-leg pants and chronicled the rise and fall of the skirt hem.
She was the mother of Henry, 5, and wife of Ben Court, a senior editor at Men's Health. Determined to march on after being diagnosed in 2011 with Stage 3 triple-negative breast cancer, Barker continued to work full time until August, and never complained about her health setbacks or her fate.
Barker wrote a first-person essay about the media's ignorance of women who battle their diagnoses quietly, pegged to an international frenzy over Angelina Jolie's decision to have a double mastectomy.
"And who are the brave ones in the country's breast cancer conversation? They're so quiet as to be all but ignored. They're the women with metastatic disease, especially the young women I get chemo alongside at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, the ones who really may not see their children graduate from kindergarten, let alone high school."
Barker: brave, graceful, strong. She vibrated with life, effervescent color, adventure and heart. Her unbreakable spirit will always remain one of the brightest of lights inside our newsroom.
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