‘I have known Lucia Berlin’s work for more than thirty years—ever since I acquired the slim, beige 1981 Turtle Island paperback called Angels Laundromat. By the time of her third collection, I had come to know her personally, from a distance, though I can’t remember how. There on the flyleaf of the beautiful Safe & Sound, her 1988 novel, is an inscription. We never did meet face to face.
‘Berlin, who was born in 1936, in Juneau, Alaska, and died in 2004, on her sixty-eighth birthday, based many of her stories on events in her own life. One of her sons said, after her death, “Ma wrote true stories, not necessarily autobiographical, but close enough for horseshoes.” Although people talk, as though it were a new thing, about the form of fiction known in France as auto-fiction (“self-fiction”)—the narration of one’s own life, lifted almost unchanged from the reality, selected, and judiciously, artfully told—Lucia Berlin had been doing this, or a version of this, as far as I can see, from the beginning, back in the nineteen-sixties. Of course, for the sake of balance, or color, she changed whatever she had to in shaping her stories—details of events and descriptions, chronology. One of her sons said, “Our family stories and memories have been slowly reshaped, embellished and edited to the extent that I’m not sure what really happened all the time. Lucia said this didn’t matter: the story is the thing.”
‘Berlin’s life was rich and full of incident, and the material she took from it for her stories was colorful, dramatic, and wide-ranging. The places she and her family lived in her childhood and youth were determined by her father—where he worked in her early years, then his going off to serve in the Second World War, and then his job when he returned from the war. Thus, she was born in Alaska and grew up first in mining camps in the west of the U.S.; then lived with her mother’s family in El Paso, while her father was gone; then was transplanted south into a very different life in Chile, one of wealth and privilege, which is portrayed in her stories about a teenage girl in Santiago, about Catholic school there, about political turbulence, yacht clubs, dressmakers, slums, revolution. As an adult she continued to lead a restless life, geographically, living in Mexico, Arizona, New Mexico, New York City; one of her sons remembers moving about every nine months as a child. Later in her life she taught in Boulder, Colorado, and at the very end of it she moved closer to her sons, to Los Angeles.
‘She writes about her sons—she had four—and the jobs she worked to support them, often on her own. Or, we should say, she writes about a woman with four sons, jobs like her jobs—cleaning woman, E.R. nurse, hospital-ward clerk, hospital-switchboard operator, teacher.
‘She lived in so many places, experienced so much—it was enough to fill several lives. We have, most of us, known at least some part of what she went through: children in trouble, or early molestation, or a rapturous love affair, struggles with addiction, a difficult illness or disability, an unexpected bond with a sibling, or a tedious job, difficult fellow workers, a demanding boss, or a deceitful friend, not to speak of awe in the presence of the natural world—Hereford cattle knee-deep in Indian paintbrush, a field of bluebonnets, a pink rocket flower growing in the alley behind a hospital. Because we have known some part of it, or something like it, we are right there with her as she takes us through it.
‘Things actually happen in the stories—a whole mouthful of teeth gets pulled at once; a little girl gets expelled from school for striking a nun; an old man dies in a mountaintop cabin, his goats and his dog in bed with him; the history teacher with her mildewed sweater is dismissed for being a Communist—“That’s all it took. Three words to my father. She was fired sometime that weekend and we never saw her again.”
‘Is this why it is almost impossible to stop reading a story of Lucia Berlin’s once you begin? Is it because things keep happening? Is it also the narrating voice, so engaging, so companionable? Along with the economy, the pacing, the imagery, the clarity? These stories make you forget what you were doing, where you are, even who you are.
‘“Wait,” begins one story. “Let me explain . . .” It is a voice close to Lucia’s own, though never identical. Her wit and her irony flow through the stories and overflow in her letters, too: “She is taking her medication,” she told me once, in 2002, about a friend, “which makes a big difference! What did people do before Prozac? Beat up horses I guess.”
Beat up horses. Where did that come from? The past was maybe as alive in her mind as were other cultures, other languages, politics, human foibles; the range of her reference so rich and even exotic that switchboard operators lean into their boards like milkmaids leaning into their cows; or a friend comes to the door, “Her black hair . . . up in tin rollers, like a kabuki headdress.”
‘The past—I read this passage from “So Long” a few times, with relish, with wonder, before I realized what she was doing:
One night it was bitterly cold, Ben and Keith were sleeping with me, in snowsuits. The shutters banged in the wind, shutters as old as Herman Melville. It was Sunday so there were no cars. Below in the streets the sailmaker passed, in a horse-drawn cart. Clop clop. Sleet hissed cold against the windows and Max called. Hello, he said. I’m right around the corner in a phone booth.
He came with roses, a bottle of brandy and four tickets to Acapulco. I woke up the boys and we left.
‘They were living in lower Manhattan, at a time when the heat would be turned off at the end of the working day if you lived in a loft. Maybe the shutters really were as old as Herman Melville, since in some parts of Manhattan buildings did date from the 1860s, back then, more of them than now, though now, too. Though it could be that she is exaggerating again—a beautiful exaggeration, if so, a beautiful flourish. She goes on: “It was Sunday so there were no cars.” That sounded realistic, so, then, I was fooled by the sailmaker and the horse-drawn cart, which came next—I believed it and accepted it, and only realized after another reading that she must have jumped back effortlessly into Melville’s time again. The “Clop clop,” too, is something she likes to do—waste no words, add a detail in note form. The “sleet hissing” took me in there, within those walls, and then the action accelerated and we were suddenly on our way to Acapulco.
‘This is exhilarating writing.
‘Another story begins with a typically straightforward and informative statement that I can easily believe is drawn directly from Berlin’s own life: “I’ve worked in hospitals for years now and if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that the sicker the patients are the less noise they make. That’s why I ignore the patient intercom.”
‘Reading that, I’m reminded of the stories of William Carlos Williams when he wrote as the family doctor he was—his directness, his frank and knowledgeable details of medical conditions and treatment, his objective reporting. Even more than Williams, Berlin also saw Chekhov (another doctor) as a model and teacher. In fact, she says in a letter to Stephen Emerson that what gives life to their work is their physician’s detachment, combined with compassion. She goes on to mention their use of specific detail and their economy—“No words are written that aren’t necessary.” Detachment, compassion, specific detail, and economy—and we are well on the way to identifying some of the most important things in good writing. But there is always a little more to say.’ — Lydia Davis
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Further
Lucia Berlin Website
‘Smoking with Lucia’
‘A Roundtable on Lucia Berlin, the Greatest American Writer You’ve Never Heard Of’
Tom Raworth’s Lucia Berlin Tribute Page
‘Short Story Master Rediscovered’
‘THE RISKY BRILLIANCE OF LUCIA BERLIN’
‘Friends’, a story by Lucia Berlin
‘Stars and Saints’, a story by Lucia Berlin
‘Angels Laundromat’, a story by Lucia Berlin
’11 Years After Her Death, Lucia Berlin Is Finally a Bestselling Author’
‘Lucia Berlin’s Roving, Rowdy Life Is Reflected in a Book of Her Stories’
‘Best Kept Secrets: The Fiction of Lucia Berlin’
‘Lucia Berlin: Literary genius who transformed my life’
‘LUCIA BERLIN AND A TALE OF TWO BOOK COVERS’
Audio: Lucia Berlin Writing Workshop
‘Out of the Dark: A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin’
Lucia Berlin @ Citizen Film
Buy ‘A Manual for Cleaning Women’
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Extras
Lucia Berlin: Pen Pals
Lucia Berlin: Mama
Lucia Berlin: Unmanageable
Lucia Berlin: My Jockey
Lucia Berlin: Angels Laundromat
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Handwriting
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Interview
from Literary Hub
Kellie Paluck: Okay, here’s the first, general question. What are your poetics?
Lucia Berlin: I have no idea.
Adrian Zupp: That’s good! [Laughter]
Lucia Berlin: Hmm… what’d you say?
AZ: I said that’s good, that’s interesting. So for you, poetics… I guess was something that you thought about once you ended up in academia, but…
Lucia Berlin: I still don’t think about it.
AZ: No? Why not?
Lucia Berlin: I guess I just object to putting whatever I do into a word called poetics.
KP: So would you object to someone writing a thesis about your poetics?
Lucia Berlin: No, people do it all the time and I’m always amazed. I’m amazed at how much poetics I have!
KP: But you don’t disagree with them?
Lucia Berlin: No, no. I just don’t write with that in mind. I don’t have a credo about writing, or about the suffering of the poor, single women, or the American underbelly, or something.
KP: Well, I know you don’t have a political agenda.
Lucia Berlin: No. I just write what seems to me to feel true. To feel emotionally true. When there’s emotional truth, there follows a rhythm, and I think a beauty of image, because you’re seeing clearly. Because of the simplicity of what you see.
KP: So it sounds like you don’t have a specific audience in mind either when you’re writing?
Lucia Berlin: No.
KP: Who buys your books?
Lucia Berlin: Not many people! [Laughter] No, but… the people who respond to my books are people who respond on a very emotional, very intuitive level.
KP: Do you think more women buy your books than men?
Lucia Berlin: Definitely.
KP: And do they just come across your books in a bookstore? Or do they hear about you from someone?
Lucia Berlin: Usually they’ve heard about me from someone, or read a story in a magazine and then gotten my books. Actually, I think I have as many male readers.
AZ: Really? That’s interesting.
Lucia Berlin: Men like the cleanness of my writing, I think. And it’s not sentimental and it’s not super-feminist. I think I have about an equal number of men. Older women and younger males, I think.
AZ: You’ve probably answered this in other interviews, but I tend to think that with people who don’t write with an audience in mind—that they also don’t write with publication in mind, so much… What was your initial impetus for writing? Was it for catharsis, or is it just a joy to do it?
Lucia Berlin: It’s a joy to do it. It’s a place to go. It definitely is a place where I am…where I feel my honest self is. When I first started to write, I was alone. My first husband had left me, I was homesick, my parents had disowned me because I had married so young and divorced. I just wrote to—to go home. It was like a place to be where I felt I was safe. And so I write to fix a reality.
AZ: So if you’d never been published, would your personal bibliography be much the same?
Lucia Berlin: I think so.
AZ: That’s interesting.
Lucia Berlin: In fact, I have many stories that I can’t publish at all because they would hurt people’s feelings or embarrass my sons. I just write to fix a time or an event in my own head. As I said in the class it isn’t for therapy, but more for clarity, emotional clarity. To let me see what I really feel about something, to make it sort of acceptable in my head.
KP: How do you think you’d feel if you hadn’t gotten published or maybe just published in a few small journals, but nothing major? Would it still be okay that you’d spent all this time writing?
Lucia Berlin: Oh, well… there’s something else to that. No, when you write you want someone to hear it. You do. I mean I don’t write thinking, “Oh Adrian and Kellie are going to love this.” But it’s just that the act of writing comes from a feeling, for me, of connectedness, usually. Or figuring why do I feel at one with this place or with these people or in this job or in this situation. And so just the act of writing is a connection, a giving out. It’s like in telling a joke, you want somebody to laugh.
KP: Then you’re lucky because you sound like you haven’t had that struggle to get published.
Lucia Berlin: No, but also I never tried that hard. I never learned how to work at it properly, so I never got good publishing habits, like sending off my work. And since I have a publisher, I’m not as ambitious as I should be about getting work done and sent off. Because I never have done it for money and I’ve found that the times that I did have a contract, I just got all mixed up. Because, for instance, they wanted me to change things. I couldn’t do it. So I never count on it for income.
KP: You started to talk about how you write to have a place to go, on account of your past, and your family, and moving around. I’m curious: What if you’d had the perfect upbringing in Iowa, with two loving parents, and then the perfect marriage? What would you write about?
Lucia Berlin: Well, I don’t think I’d need to write! [Much laughter] I think Proust is quite right saying that only neurotic people write. [Laughter] You know?
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Book
Lucia Berlin A Manual for Cleaning Women
FSG
‘A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With the wit of Lorrie Moore, the grit of Raymond Carver, and a blend of humor and melancholy all her own, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday, uncovering moments of grace in the cafeterias and Laundromats of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Bay Area upper class, among switchboard operators and struggling mothers, hitchhikers and bad Christians.
‘Lovers of the short story will revel in this remarkable collection from a master of the form and wonder how they’d ever overlooked her in the first place.’ — FSG
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Excerpt
from Flavorwire
Carpe Diem
Most of the time I feel all right about getting old. Some things give me a pang, like skaters. How free they seem, long legs gliding, hair streaming back. Other things throw me into a panic, like BART doors. A long wait before the doors open, after the train comes to a stop. Not very long, but it’s too long. There’s no time.
And laundromats. But they were a problem even when I was young. Just too long, even the Speed Queens. Your entire life has time to flash before your eyes while you sit there, a drowner. Of course if I had a car I could go to the hardware store or the post of office and then come back and put things into the dryer.
The laundries with no attendants are even worse. Then it seems I’m always the only person there at all. But all of the washers and dryers are going . . . everybody is at the hardware store.
So many laundromat attendants I have known, the hovering Charons, making change or who never have change. Now it is fat Ophelia who pronounces No Sweat as No Thwet. Her top plate broke on beef jerky. Her breasts are so huge she has to turn sideways and then kitty- corner to get through doors, like moving a kitchen table. When she comes down the aisle with a mop everybody moves and moves the baskets too. She is a channel hopper. Just when we’ve settled in to watch The Newlywed Game she’ll flick it to Ryan’s Hope.
Once, to be polite, I told her I got hot ashes too, so that’s what she associates me with . . . The Change. “How ya coming with the change?” she says, loud, instead of hello. Which only makes it worse, sitting there, re ecting, aging. My sons have all grown now, so I’m down from ve washers to one, but one takes just as long.
I moved last week, maybe for the two hundredth time. I took in all my sheets and curtains and towels, my shopping cart piled high. The laundromat was very crowded; there weren’t any washers together. I put all my things into three machines, went to get change from Ophelia. I came back, put the money and the soap in, and started them. Only I had started up three wrong washers. Three that had just finished this man’s clothes.
I was backed into the machines. Ophelia and the man loomed before me. I’m a tall woman, wear Big Mama panty- hose now, but they were both huge people. Ophelia had a prewash spray bottle in her hand. The man wore cutoffs, his massive thighs were matted with red hair. His thick beard wasn’t like hair at all but a red padded bumper. He wore a baseball hat with a gorilla on it. The hat wasn’t too small but his hair was so bushy it shoved the hat high up on his head making him about seven feet tall. He was slapping a heavy fist into his other red palm. “Goddamn. I’ll be goddamned!” Ophelia wasn’t menacing; she was protecting me, ready to come between him and me, or him and the machines. She’s always saying there’s nothing at the laundry she can’t handle.
“Mister, you may’s well sit down and relax. No way to stop them machines once they’ve started. Watch a little TV, have yourself a Pepsi.”
I put quarters in the right machines and started them. Then I remembered that I was broke, no more soap and those quarters had been for dryers. I began to cry.
“What the fuck is she crying about? What do you think this does to my Saturday, you dumb slob? Jesus wept.”
I offered to put his clothes into the dryers for him, in case he wanted to go somewhere.
“I wouldn’t let you near my clothes. Like stay away from my clothes, you dig?” There was no place for him to sit except next to me. We looked at the machines. I wished he would go outside, but he just sat there, next to me. His big right leg vibrated like a spinning washer. Six little red lights glowed at us.
“You always fuck things up?” he asked.
“Look, I’m sorry. I was tired. I was in a hurry.” I began to giggle, nervously.
“Believe it or not, I am in a hurry. I drive a tow. Six days a week. Twelve hours a day. This is it. My day off.”
“What were you in a hurry for?” I meant this nicely, but he thought I was being sarcastic.
“You stupid broad. If you were a dude I’d wash you. Put your empty head in the dryer and turn it to cook.”
“I said I was sorry.”
“Damn right you’re sorry. You’re one big sorry excuse for a chick. I had you spotted for a loser before you did that to my clothes. I don’t believe this. She’s crying again. Jesus wept.”
Ophelia stood above him.
“Don’t you be bothering her, you hear? I happens to know she’s going through a hard time.”
How did she know that? I was amazed. She knows everything, this giant black Sybil, this Sphinx. Oh, she must mean The Change.
“I’ll fold your clothes if you’d like,” I said to him.
“Hush, girl,” Ophelia said. “Point is, what’s the big deal? In a hunnert years from now just who is gonna care?”
“A hunnert years,” he whispered. “A hunnert years.”
And I was thinking that too. A hundred years. Our machines were shimmying away, and all the little red spin lights were on.
“At least yours are clean. I used up all my soap.”
“I’ll buy you some soap for crissake.”
“It’s too late. Thanks anyway.”
“She didn’t ruin my day. She’s ruined my whole fuckin’ week. No soap.”
Ophelia came back, stooped down to whisper to me.
“I been spottin’ some. Doctor says it don’t quit I’ll need a D and C. You been spottin’?”
I shook my head.
“You will. Women’s troubles just go on and on. A whole lifetime of troubles. I’m bloated. You bloated?”
“Her head is bloated,” the man said. “Look, I’m
going out to the car, get a beer. I want you to promise not to go near my machines. Yours are thirty- four, thirty- nine, forty- three. Got that?”
“Yeah. Thirty- two, forty, forty- two.” He didn’t think it was funny.
The clothes were in the final spin. I’d have to hang mine up to dry on the fence. When I got paid I’d come back with soap.
“Jackie Onassis changes her sheets every single day,” Ophelia said. “Now that is sick, you ask me.”
“Sick,” I agreed.
I let the man put his clothes in a basket and go to the dryers before I took mine out. Some people were grinning but I just ignored them. I filled my cart with soggy sheets and towels. It was almost too heavy to push and, wet, not everything fit. I slung the hot- pink curtains over my shoulder. Across the room the man started to say something, then looked away.
It took a long time to get home. Even longer to hang everything, although I did find a rope. Fog was rolling in.
I poured some coffee and sat on the back steps. I was happy. I felt calm, unhurried. Next time I am on BART, I won’t even think about getting off until the train stops. When it does, I’ll make it out just in time.
*
p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Fly, awesome. I’m going to start using that superlative again. Just watch me. We didn’t get to do the watch-through because there was still too much work to do on the haunted house part, but we will this morning. Today’s our last sound mix day and there’s a ton to do. It’s going to be a lonnnng one. Yes, the French producer is going to show the film to French distributors in the next days, and he’s going to submit the film to Cannes on Friday. Very long shot, but he thinks the film has a chance, so he wants to try. Love’s Paris magic trick made me imagine bouncy castle metro trains, which for some reason hits the spot. Love letting us finish the sound mix/design today to the point where we’re satisfied and not disappointed that time ran out too early for perfection, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, That Deller piece was in France, but in a far-off region that I never managed to train to in time. I think I agree that the new Play Therapy is the best yet, or least probably my favorite. Nonstop bliss, fantastic flow. We took our lunch break yesterday to get sandwiches to bring back to the studio, and I mentioned PT, and the sound mixer was curious, so I got to hear the episode through his amazing sound system, and we were all sufficiently enthralled that our lunch break ran way long, which we ended up paying for, but it was worth it. I think my favorite part was the stretch of kind of moody but perky tracks starting about half hour in and ending just before the Spin track. Anyway, big kudos, and thank you, man. ** Jack Skelley, Jack… off???? Wally Cox, Rudolf Nureyev, … hm. Dennn… hiss! ** Mark, Madonna finally hit LA, eh? She seems to be holding up well. I used to see Madonna hanging out in the East Village in the early 80s a fair amount. But that didn’t make special. Everyone in the East Village did. She was just a scenester with a couple of hits under her belt back then. Envy that you saw Jack’s shebang. I’m waiting for the video. ‘Jubilee’ is fun, for sure. I’m good, swamped, finishing the film still. Glad your Paris voyage is almost cemented. ** Bill, Hey. I’ve never been in a bouncy castle weirdly enough. I’ve jumped on my fair share of trampolines. (I grew up with one in my backyard.) I didnt know Kate has a book on Guibert. How curious. I’ll obviously look for it. ** Steve, Artists always digest their influences. It’s a waste of time when artists worry about being overly influenced, I think. Hope the new day disappears your migraine. Shit. I sort of liked that he didn’t write much about Kim. But I can be kind of old fashioned maybe about personal privacy, I don’t know. ** Justin, Hi. Of course the bouncy Paris bridge ended up being a pipe dream. Sigh. Yeah, I haven’t concentrated on my own work on the blog in a long time. It’s not a natural inclination, but maybe I should, or least find some posts from back when I did do that more and restore them. Okay, I’ll figure it out. Thanks for wanting, my friend. Week being okay to you? ** Uday, Hey, hey. I think our mind meld is a sign that your friend should rent that castle. Of course they would have to think so too. Oh, I published ‘Godlike’ through my old imprint Little House on the Bowery. Maybe it’s been republished, I don’t know. I definitely like weird, off-kilter questions in interviews, and they’re sadly rare. So we should interview each other someday. Have an off-kilter contest. Pinky promise is better than scout’s honor, thank you, although that little thing scouts do with their fingers when they make the ‘honor’ promise is kind of endearing. ** Right. Do you know the stories of Lucia Berlin? If not, I swear they’re very good. See you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 