Review of A MANUAL for CLEANING WOMEN
A breathtaking posthumous collection of short stories by Lucia Berlin - a women whose picaresque life generated literary genius.
This collection was published in 2015. The writer, Lucia Berlin, died in 2006. Most of the stories were written in the last half of the last century. Lucia was barely recognized in her time and Lydia Davis has done something important by bringing her back. It is hard to know where to start. The following are a few of the ways I have I promoted this book during the past few weeks:
The title short story might be the best I have EVER read. It is auto fiction or fiction loosely based on her own life as are all of her stories.
During her life, she fought with alcoholism, was married three times, had four sons and wrote 72 stories.
Born in Alaska, raised in mining towns in the West, brought out as a debutante in Santiago Chile, Lucia led a life of great difficulty and diversity. She was a schoolteacher, an emergency room orderly, a house cleaner, and a writing professor - to name a few of her many efforts to feed a family. She was poor way more than she was not. She was BEAUTIFUL, white, and endured hard luck with men.
When writing, Lucia was compared to Raymond Carver and John Cheever. She’s better than either.
When I went into the best bookstore in Manhattan, McNally & Jackson, to buy two copies for our daughters, the saleswoman teared up describing what it was like to discover Lucia Berlin. After finishin
g the story “A Manual for Cleaning Women”, I had goose bumps up and down my arms. They may have been as much from the “discovery” of Lucia; however, upon rereading the story, I felt its stunning originality. Originality is disappearing in the ether of our digital world. Lucia Berlin is an analog antidote in every sense.
A Manual for Cleaning Women
& Selected Stories
By Lucia Berlin
(Compiled by Lydia Davis)
2015 432 pages