lucia berlin a manual for cleaning women selected stories

She’s twenty-five, and the mother of two young boys, Mark and Jeff. She’s in Mexico, by the beach in Acapulco. The passages published here, originally titled “Welcome Home,” are the final pages she completed-the last sentence, in fact, is left unfinished. Berlin drew often on her own experiences in her stories, using incidents and characters from her life, but the writing in the new project was quite different-she’s still looking at the world with the eye of a fiction writer, but she’s no longer isolating specific moments. Instead, she’s showing how they combine to form a life. For many readers, “A Manual for Cleaning Women,” a collection of selected stories published in 2015, eleven years after her death, at the age of sixty-eight, was the first introduction to stories that, as Lydia Davis, long an admirer of Berlin’s, observed, “are electric, they buzz and crackle as the live wires touch.”Īt the time of her death, in 2004, Berlin had been working on a new project, a series of sketches which traced her life from her birth in Alaska, in 1936, to her early childhood in the mining towns of the West, where her father was an engineer, to the years she spent in El Paso with her maternal grandfather, a dentist, before her family moved to Chile after the Second World War. Lucia Berlin was a writer whose work went under-read for much of her life. Photograph by Buddy Berlin / Literary Estate of Lucia Berlin Lucia Berlin with her sons Jeff and Mark, Mirador Hotel, Acapulco, Mexico, November, 1961.

Lucia berlin a manual for cleaning women selected stories