From one multilingual writer to another – I discovered Lucia Berlin by chance when I misconstrued the title of her posthumous short story collection A Manual for Cleaning Women. I read it as instructional, like: how to clean women. No idea why that would attract my attention, that would probably require some regression therapy or hypnosis. I fell in love with her writing, encapsulated for me by her idea of ‘emotional truth’ as really the only writing rule to live by. And also by her eschewing of the line between fiction and reality with this undeniable reasoning: “The story’s the thing.” She inspired the name of my own Substack via one of my favourite lines of all time: “Of course I have a self here, and a new family, new cats, new jokes. But I keep trying to remember who I was in English.” It comes from the beautiful, melodic short story ‘So Long’ that recounts her mad, complicated, rich and fascinating life. In many ways, it stands for all lives.
Included in A Manual for Cleaning Women, Picador, 2015
A Personal Anthology 