Lucia Berlin (1936-2004) did not receive wide spread recognition for her short stories until after the publication of this posthumous book by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2015, over ten years after her death. Initiated by Berlin’s friends Barry Gifford, Michael Wolfe and editor Stephen Emerson, it features 43 of the 76 short stories she wrote during her lifetime. The poems are arranged in order of their first publication in book form. This outstanding collection rightfully became a New York Times best seller and has been translated into at least 21 languages.
Berlin published six books of short stories between 1977-1999 through the small press, the best known were through John Martin’s Black Sparrow Press, Homesick: New and Selected Stories (1990), So Long: Stories 1987-1992 (1993) and Where I Live Now: Stories 1993-1998 (1999).
Lucia Berlin was married three times by the time she was 30 and worked at a variety of jobs including relief high school teacher, cleaning lady, doctor’s assistant, hospital ward clerk and switchboard operator. In later life she taught writing at UC and was highly admired by her students: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucia_Berlin
Many of Berlin’s stories are mildly disguised autobiography. In Lydia Davis’s Foreword: ‘The Story Is the Thing’: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-story-is-the-thing-on-lucia-berlin she quotes Mark Berlin, Lucia Berlin’s eldest son after her death:
“Ma wrote true stories, not necessarily autobiographical, but close enough for horseshoes… Our family stories and memories have been slowly reshaped, embellished and edited to the extent that I’m not sure what really happened all the time. Lucia said this didn’t matter: the story is the thing.”
Davis surmises, “Of course, for the sake of balance, or color, she changed whatever she had to, in shaping her stories- details of events and descriptions, chronology. She admitted to exaggerating. One of her narrators says, “ I exaggerate a lot and I get fiction and reality mixed up, but I don’t actually ever lie.”
Here’s are some of the best short stories to be found in A Manual for Cleaning Women (2015):
Angel’s Laundromat (from Homesick)
This is a terrific story to open the collection. It quickly establishes Berlin’s alternative press credentials. The story is told through the eyes of Lucia (pronounced Lu-chee-aby Tony the Jicarilla Apache, a World War II Veteran) who frequents the laundromat in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The story combines reportage with shrewd character analysis and social observation.
Read the story here: https://fsgworkinprogress.com/2015/08/20/angels-laundromat/
Good and Bad (from So Long)
This story is told from the point of view of a young unnamed female student who attends the elitist Santiago College Chile in 1952. Her father is an American mining engineer with links to the CIA. Miss Ethel Dawson, a casual teacher at the school, tries to radicalise and instil a sense of social justice in her student by getting her to help feed the poor and partaking in the revolutionary struggle through poetry readings and demonstrations. Berlin drew upon her privileged upbringing in Chile to show the great divide of wealth and power in the country and the difficulty of political and economic change.
Her First Detox
Berlin battled with alcoholism for decades before conquering the stuff for the last 20 years of her life. This remarkable story is told through a third person account of Carlotta- a young, naïve teacher, clearly Berlin’s alter-ego. The language is pared back and the events described sparkingly clear.
Her stories ‘Step’, ‘Strays, and most importantly, ‘Unmanageable’ in the collection also explore the downside of addiction in a gritty, realistic way.
Here It Is Sunday (previously published in Where I Live Now)
This story is narrated by Chaz, a habitual criminal who recounts from County #3 prison how Mrs Bevins, a writing teacher (based on Berlin’s experiences at the SF County Jail) helps the prisoners put together a magazine of their writing.
Let Me See you Smile (previously published in Where I Live Now)
The story is told through two alternating narrators- Jon Cohen, a public defender and Carlotta Moran (Maggie), based on Berlin, who hires Cohen after she is charged with a string of offences, including attempted murder, after a serious incident at San Francisco International Airport. This is the longest short story in the collection (31 pages) and candidly depicts a life of reckless abandon and alcoholism which inevitably spirals its way into the Courts.
Tiger Bites
Told by Lou (Mary Moynihan), 19, she describes attending a family reunion in El Paso after her husband Joe has left her and their child to pursue a Guggenheim scholarship in Italy. She is four months pregnant and her flamboyant cousin Bella Lynn arranges for her to attend a Mexican abortion clinic. This highly realistic story wavers between hilarity and immense sadness.
Read the story here: https://lithub.com/tiger-bites/
A Manual for Cleaning Women
This is a brilliant story which is layered through the various arcs in which the unnamed narrator (presumably Berlin who worked in the industry) unfolds- the various buses to catch, the eccentricities of her clients, tips for cleaning ladies and her reflections on her former partner Ter.
Find the title story ‘A Manual for Cleaning Women’ here: https://www.shortstoryproject.com/story/a-manual-for-cleaning-women/
Acapulco, Mexico, 1961
Buy the book here:
REVIEWS:
Dale Smith’s review of the collection in Brick: https://brickmag.com/a-manual-for-cleaning-women-by-lucia-berlin/
Guardian review: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/30/a-manual-for-cleaning-women-lucia-berlin-review-short-stories
NY Times review: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/books/review/a-manual-for-cleaning-women-by-lucia-berlin.html
The Paris Review: Rebecca Bengal ‘But I Don’t Ever Lie: On Lucia Berlin’ (December 2018): https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/12/11/but-i-dont-ever-lie-lucia-berlin/
ESSAYS:
Economy and Endings in Lucia berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women:
A follow-up collection, Evening in Paradise: More Stories (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), includes a further 22 of Berlin’s short stories: https://www.amazon.com.au/Evening-Paradise-Stories-Lucia-Berlin/dp/0374279489
In comparison to A Manual for Cleaning Women this collection is lightweight. There are a handful of excellent short stories including 'The Adobe House with a Tin Roof', 'La Barca de la Ilusion', 'Lead Street, Albuquerque', 'Dust to Dust' and 'Noel. Texas. 1956' which could have been easily included in the first posthumous collection.
Welcome Home: A Memoir with Selected Photographs & Letters (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018) is another book which attempts to take advantage of the success of A Manual for Cleaning Women (2015). It was being developed by Berlin and unfortunately she died in 2004 and the last version of her manuscript ends in 1965.
The most interesting section 'Welcome Home' includes 73 photos and helps to reader to fathom how Berlin shaped some of her real life experiences into fiction.
The second section 'Selected Letters, 1944-1965' is misleading as the vast majority of letters are written by Berlin to her friends Ed and Helen Dorn between 1959-1965. Ed Dorn was her teacher at the University of New Mexico in the 1960s and in 1994 he brought Berlin to the University of Colorado where she spent the next six years before she had to retire because of her failing health due to complications related to her scoliosis condition.
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