“I was leaving Chile for college in New Mexico. It was the going alone that was so glamorous. Dark glasses and high heels.” And it’s her first plane trip. There are stop-offs, at each of which her father has arranged for someone to meet her. Lima: Ingeborg, long tan legs, a large colour photograph of her father wearing “a rose-colored shirt that I had never seen before”. Panama: Mrs Kirby, canasta in “the pale silence of the American sector”. Miami: aunt Martha, grotesquely fat, “I clung to her, sank into her and her smell of Jergens lotion, Johnson’s baby powder”. Albuquerque: “The air was clean and cold in New Mexico. No one met me.” Pride, excitement, vulnerability, “so much I did not see or understand, and now it is too late”.
Where has Lucia Berlin been all my life? She was published by small presses in the 1980s and by Black Sparrow Press from 1990 and she died in 2004 and it took until 2015 for a big publisher, and then critics and reviewers, to wake up and take notice. She is sharp, quick (but alert to everything going on in the room), funny, unafraid, generous. (All things which contemporary mainstream publishing is not: I have no doubt there are other Lucia Berlins out there still waiting for the readers they deserve.) Of course she wrote short stories: there were too many other things going on in her life to sit down at a desk for the time it takes to write a novel.
Published in Evening in Paradise, Picador, 2018
A Personal Anthology 