"Solitude is an Anglo-Saxon concept," writes Berlin. In "Fool to Cry," chemo has begun and the dying sister's house is filled with children, ex-husbands and lovers. In "Grief," we see the sisters on the occasion of their reunion after years of alienation through the eyes of other vacationers observing and discussing them at a Zihuatanejo resort. Often a single experience, like the period Berlin spent caring for her dying younger sister in Mexico, is told in several different ways. Though she had lifelong scoliosis so serious it eventually punctured her lung, it makes very slight appearance in the stories. There's a good bio at the end of the book, and images of her Elizabeth Taylor-esque beauty at. Berlin's childhood in Western mining towns, El Paso, Texas, and Santiago, Chile her years on the West Coast as an alcoholic single mother of four boys her series of jobs as a teacher, nurse, cleaning lady, switchboard operator her final, peaceful years in Boulder. Bevins, many facets of a fascinating biography come into focus.
the 1960s."Īnd so, with a series of narrators named Lucia, Lu, Lucille, LB, Carlotta, Dolores and Ms. "Although people talk, as though it were a new thing, about the form of fiction known in France as auto-fiction ('self-fiction')," she writes, "the narration of one's own life, lifted almost unchanged from the reality, selected and judiciously, artfully told, Lucia Berlin has been doing this. She has many interesting things to point out about Berlin's writing, though they mean more after you read the book than before.
One of those was the writer Lydia Davis, who explains in a foreword that she has been a fan for more than 30 years. Anyone who loves the stories of Grace Paley and Lorrie Moore will find another master of the form here - and will feel immense gratitude to the supporters who brought us this collection, selected from earlier small-press editions of her work. How a writer with this much appeal slipped under the radar is unfathomable, though sexism may be involved. The vivacity, humor, sorrow, pragmatism and sheer literary star power that fill the 43 stories collected in "A Manual For Cleaning Women" hit with such immediacy and vigor that it seems unbelievable that their author, Lucia Berlin, died in 2004, at the age of 68, before most of us ever knew about her. A MANUAL FOR CLEANING WOMEN: Selected Stories, by Lucia Berlin, edited by Stephen Emerson.
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