Tag: Lucia Berlin

‘Stars and Saints’ by Lucia Berlin

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

‘Unmanageable’ by Lucia Berlin

I find myself slightly incapable of introducing this story. It is about a woman; a mother; an alcoholic. It is short, the writing is spare. Berlin manages to cram the cruel dynamics of addiction, neglect, duty, guilt, motherhood, and childhood into so few sentences, and not without a little wit and even warmth. It is characteristic of the whole collection, A Manual for Cleaning Women, and every time I read it, I feel like I’ve been hit by a lorry.

It is the middle of the night when the narrator realises her bottle of vodka is empty:

“At six, in two hours, the Uptown Liquor Store in Oakland would sell her some vodka. In Berkeley you had to wait until seven. Oh, God, did she have any money? She crept back to her room to check in her purse on the desk. Her son Nick must have taken her wallet and car keys. She couldn’t look for them in her sons’ room without waking them.”

Collected in A Manual for Cleaning Women, Picador, 2015

‘So Long’ by Lucia Berlin

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

‘Itinerary’ by Lucia Berlin

“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

‘Dr H. A. Moynihan’ by Lucia Berlin

A young girl is expelled from school for striking a nun and forced to spend every day of her summer vacation working in her grandfather’s dental office. Despite his alcoholism and the filth of his working environment, he makes the best set of false teeth in all of Texas in his workshop, a place of pure horror, where the intensely visceral climactic scene unfolds. With her spare, unsentimental prose, Berlin normalises the trauma the grandfather puts his granddaughter through, even tempering it with the darkly comic image of the child hitting the wrong lever and “the chair spinning him around, spattering circles of blood on the floor”. 

Minor characters such as the Mexican and Syrian neighbourhood children the narrator isn’t allowed to play with, Jim, the black elevator man in the building where her grandfather’s sign “I Don’t Work for Negroes” hangs, and Mamie dying amid “the stench and the flies” speak to us, through their silence, of the poverty and racism of working-class 1940s/50s America. 

Published in A Manual for Cleaning Women, Picador, 2015. Picked by Hazel Norbury. Hazel is currently completing her MA in Creative Writing at City, University of London, and finalising the draft of her first novel Turkish Mosaic.

‘My Jockey’ by Lucia Berlin

I moved to Donegal on the north-west coast of Ireland to write my first novel. I had been living in a London houseshare, juggling multiple jobs, so when my grandad died, leaving an empty cottage in Donegal, I decided to go there to find time and space to write. The house is in a remote fishing village and I cannot drive. I tutored a local student and cycled to the library every day. The experience was transformative; the landscape is wild and storm-wracked and I finally had a room of my own. I had very little money and no internet connection but I read and read, studying the shapes of novels and working out what kind of writer I might be.

My first novel, Saltwater, is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story, told through the lens of a mother-daughter relationship. It is partly about northern, working-class identity, which I hadn’t often seen represented in literary novels. A Manual for Cleaning Women is a collection of short stories about women working all kinds of menial jobs, trying to find their way through the world. The title references the cleaning women that Berlin writes about, but it also centres working-class women as the readers of the anthology; these stories are about us and also for us, which felt radical to me as a working-class woman trying to write my own story, prompting me to consider whom we assume writing is for.

‘My Jockey’ is a short, piercing story which demonstrates Berlin’s power. It is told from the perspective of a woman working in the emergency department of a hospital, looking after a jockey who arrives with broken bones. The piece explores power, gender roles, loneliness, motherhood and the fragility of the human body in Berlin’s stark, direct prose.

First published in Home Sick: New and Selected Stories, Black Sparrow, 1991; also in A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin, Picador, 2016

‘So Long’ by Lucia Berlin

In ‘So Long’ the story of a couple’s relationship is framed around their years of ongoing phone calls. “I love to hear Max say hello,” it begins. “I called him when we were new lovers, adulterers… We’ve been divorced for many years.” I assign this story every time I teach and still, it never fails makes me weep. What moves me is Berlin’s portrait of the friendship that has endured after a marriage has ended, and her depiction of love as one long conversation. The seamless way Berlin moves between the narrator’s present, caring for her terminally ill sister in Mexico, and the heat of her love affair many years earlier with Max, is masterful. As with all her stories, Berlin has a gift for reflection without recrimination, and handling the darker aspects of life—like cancer, or addiction—with grace and levity.

First published in So Long: Stories 1987-1992, Black Sparrow Press, 1993. Collected in A Manual for Cleaning Women: Lucia Berlin Selected Stories, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015

‘Grief’ by Lucia Berlin

This Lucia Berlin story, about two sisters who go away together, is one that I have returned to many times over the years. Partly because of the writing style and the craft of it, partly also simply because of the storyline. I love the way it opens, almost like a film, a wide shot of the hotel where the sisters are staying, then the guests, then all the sights and sounds that bring the story to life, and make it so vivid and electric as is Berlin’s style. There’s a couple of lines here I underscored years ago that I just love for the sounds: the “Snap snap of dealt cards. Mrs Wacher’s hmms. Two no trump. The sizzle of the surf, ice cubes in their glasses.” What I like so much is the way the setting is created, and how from there, the camera moves and then we settle on the two sisters themselves. It’s so atmospheric, rich in description, yet not overdone. I quite like all the gossipy hotel guests too, watching the two sisters and wondering what they are doing together. I find stories about sisters endlessly fascinating; this one is no exception.

Collected in A Manual for Cleaning Women, Picador, 2015

‘Tiger Bites’ by Lucia Berlin

It’s Christmas time in 1956 and Lou, a soon-to-be-single mother of toddler Ben has arrived in El Paso, Texas for a family reunion. Her glamorous cousin Bella Lynn picks her up from the train and informs her: “Your mama and my mama started drinking and fighting right off the bat. Mama went up on the garage roof and won’t come down. Your mother slit her wrists.” 

I knew as soon as I started reading Lucia Berlin’s ‘Tiger Bites’ that it was the Christmas Story for me. My Christmas memories are marked by neighbourhood violence, breakdowns, cold radiators, cash shortages, and a kind of squalor that we all wished would magically go away. ‘Tiger Bites’ takes place in a different time and place, but the trouble that eclipses Christmas in this story seemed so familiar to me that I wanted to claim Lucia Berlin as family when I read it. 

Lou is pregnant with a second child and her husband Joe has left her. Rather than finding solace among her family on the Southern US border, she’s persuaded to travel to Juarez, Mexico where, for $500 cash, she can obtain an abortion at a secret clinic. Her journey there and what she witnesses is terrifying. And yet, there’s also a kind of magic to the story. It’s not redemptive, but even as Lou observes and endures terrible things, she conveys what’s happening with humour and warmth. And the terrible things don’t destroy Lou; she keeps going.

First published in A Manual for Cleaning Women, Picador, 2015. Also available online at LitHub.

Chosen by Linda Mannheim. Linda is the author of three books of fiction, most recently This Way to Departures, a collection of stories about people who have left the places they consider home. Her work has appeared in Granta, Catapult Story, Ambit and other magazines. You can read her full Personal Anthology here.

‘Let me See you Smile’ by Lucia Berlin

This was the first ever Lucia Berlin story I read, and for a long while after, I didn’t read another. This story is a smooth cinematic saga, about three characters—Maggie, her boyfriend Jesse who is disconcertingly younger than her, and their lawyer Jon Cohen whose own marriage fades when he witnesses and becomes embroiled in the dangerously magnetic pulse of Maggie and Jesse’s love. The story is a saga in the coffee and long drives and cigarettes and drugs and cops and hot searching love sort of way, and reading it gave me a long arc to dwell in; long enough to feel sorrowed by the splinters of Berlin’s carefully plotted mixed-voices narrative, and long enough to thrill at the light-headed rush acquired by following lives lived to their fullest bloom.  

First published in Where I Live Now, Black Sparrow Press, 1999

‘A Manual for Cleaning Women’ by Lucia Berlin

‘I flip the vacuum on, lie down under the piano with a rag clutched in my hand just in case. I lie there and hum and think.’

This story is a detached, first-person account of the everyday life of a 1970s cleaner, taking endless cramped, wet, late, vomit-infused buses house to house, dealing with different kinds of women in different kinds of homes. The narrative is created by an overlapping series of domestic vignettes; internal dialogues with her deceased lover Terry; glimpses of street scenes from the bus window; and lists of household objects, bus routes, advert slogans. It is a tense and fragile patchwork of private thoughts existing within public structures, punctuated by advice in parentheses to other cleaners. Berlin gives us a chorus of textual connections, from Braille to billboards, unintelligible notes, TV screens and neon signs, in sharp contrast to the voicelessness of the narrator – when she tries to talk to the children of the house, her boss snaps at her; in the final home where she finds a missing jigsaw piece and says “I found it”, her boss corrects her, claiming “I found it”. Berlin’s stories are full of second chances and moments of redemption. She infuses her characters, often invisible in society, with great dignity and strength. I like the different ways of seeing she presents and the inherent class hierarchies that imbue those ways of seeing and being seen: the poor seeing the poor, in laundromat windows, in television reflections, in the cocaine mirrors of the rich, while the wealthy are as unseeing as “the lazy blind eyes” of the fish head in the carrier bag, waiting to be soup.

In A Manual for Cleaning Women (Picador, 2015)

‘Tiger Bites’ by Lucia Berlin

Berlin is a new favourite of mine. The anthology is chock full of wonders, but when I think of the book and all it contains, my mind’s eye conjures the image of a beautiful woman standing up inside a convertible. Revisiting Tiger Bites, I see it’s a cousin to Welty’s story. The pace is as hectic, the characters as engagingly off the wall. Here, too, a woman without resources is forced to return to her family, child in tow, following the collapse of her marriage. Events go off — wildly so — in unexpected directions. It’s the matter-of-factness of Berlin’s characters, and their ability to accept one another (in circumstances that would drive others into therapy), that catches me every time.

Available in A Manual for Cleaning Women, published by Picador in 2015