I return to Lucia Berlin time and time again as she is the master of pace and image. There’s glorious pathos and wit. Like her, I also believe the story primo. It has to come from something real. Berlin is my favourite short story writer. Do yourself a favour. Buy ‘A Manual for Cleaning Women’. What a life!

I edited this profile on Lucia Berlin written by Lydia Davis. It was published in The New Yorker on 12 August, 2015, called ‘The Story is the thing: on Lucia Berlin’

Berlin 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.

Although people talk, as though it were a new thing, about the form of fiction called 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 colour, she changed whatever she had to in shaping her stories—details of events and descriptions, chronology. 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 colourful, 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. 

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.

Her writing 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.”

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.

How does she do it? It’s that we never know quite what is going to come next. Nothing is predictable. And yet everything is also natural, true to life, true to our expectations of psychology and emotion.

Berlin is unflinching, pulls no punches, and yet the brutality of life is always tempered by her compassion for human frailty, the wit and intelligence of that narrating voice, and her gentle humour.

In a story called “Silence,” the narrator says, “I don’t mind telling people awful things if I can make them funny.” (Though some things, she adds, just aren’t funny.)

Sometimes the comedy is broad, as in “Sex Appeal,” where the pretty cousin Bella Lynn sets off in an airplane toward what she hopes will be a Hollywood career, her bust enhanced by an inflatable bra—but when the airplane reaches cruising altitude, the bra explodes.

Usually the humour is more understated, a natural part of the narrative conversation—for instance, about the difficulty of buying alcoholic beverages in Boulder: “The liquor stores are gigantic Target-size nightmares. You could die from D.T.s just trying to find the Jim Beam aisle.” She goes on to inform us that “the best town is Albuquerque where the liquor stores have drive-through windows, so you don’t even have to get out of your pyjamas.”

As in life, comedy can occur in the midst of tragedy: the younger sister, dying of cancer, wails, “I’ll never see donkeys again!” and both sisters eventually laugh and laugh, but the poignant exclamation stays with you. Death has become so immediate—no more donkeys, no more of so many things.

Did Berlin learn her fantastic ability to tell a story from the storytellers she grew up with? Or was she always attracted to storytellers, did she seek them out, learn from them? Both, no doubt. She had a natural feel for the form, the structure of a story.

How did a story come into being, for Lucia Berlin? Johnston has a possible answer: “She would start with something as simple as the line of a jaw, or a yellow mimosa.” She herself goes on to say, “But the image has to connect to a specific intense experience.” Elsewhere, in a letter to August Kleinzahler, she describes how she goes forward: “I get started, & then it’s just like writing this to you, only more legible . . .” Some part of her mind, at the same time, must always have been in control of the shape and sequence of the story, and the end of it.

She said the story had to be real—whatever that meant for her. I think it meant not contrived, not incidental or gratuitous: it had to be deeply felt, emotionally important. She told a student of hers that the story he had written was too clever—don’t try to be clever, she said. She typeset one of her own stories in hot metal on a Linotype machine, and after three days of work threw all the slugs back into the melting pot, because, she said, the story was “false.”

Berlin’s publications eventually moved out of the small-press world and into the medium-press world of Black Sparrow and then, later, of Godine. One of her collections won the American Book Award. But even with that recognition, she had not yet found the wide readership she should have had by then.

I have always had faith that the best writers will rise to the top, like cream, sooner or later, and will become exactly as well-known as they should be—their work talked about, quoted, taught, performed, filmed, set to music, anthologized. Perhaps, with the present collection, Lucia Berlin will begin to gain the attention she deserves.

I could quote almost any part of any story by Lucia Berlin, for contemplation, for enjoyment, but here is one last favourite: “So what is marriage anyway? I never figured it out. And now it is death I don’t understand.”

This essay is adapted from the foreword to “A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories,” by Lucia Berlin