A story about first impressions (going wrong) told in digestible vignettes. “There was no way that I could explain that it all happened so fast, that I wasn’t smiling away at the cats chewing the birds. It was that my happiness about the sweet peas and the finches hadn’t had time to fade.” This is the character’s response to a psychiatrist seeing her smile at a cat eating some birds. Not the usual intensely comic or clipped voice that we expect from Berlin, it’s a little more deprived and sardonic. A litany of small shames forms a story of a young woman who can’t do right from doing wrong. She is endlessly defensive, all the things going wrong in her life have nothing to do with her! They happen without her input, she just happens to keep being there. People are misreading the situation. I love stories that examine agency in this way. She decides at some point to become a Catholic which causes her mother and grandfather to have a fit and the story morphs to a schoolscape, where Sister Cecilia takes her on a wild ride, or vice versa. Crazy characters like this make me feel more at peace somehow.
Collected in A Manual for Cleaning Women, Picador, 2015
A Personal Anthology 